Symphony of Shadows
by Mechalich
Summary: In espionage and para-military ops, the little things are often just as important as the big things. Fail to clean up a mess and it can haunt you severely. Orochimaru failed to clean up his mess, will Sasuke's failure to clean up doom him too?
1. 01 In the Key of Seeking

In the Key of Seeking

**Author's Intro: **This story deals with the fallout of Orochimaru's death and Sasuke's subsequent destruction of his secret organization, and what happens to a number of people who were or are in that order. Numerous manga spoilers.

**In the Key of Seeking**

Only a ninja can beat a ninja. It was one of the hundred ninja sayings, not the most profoundly phrased among them, but simple and accurate. A wise man, or ninja, applied it more broadly, and understood that it was necessary to understand something before you could defeat it, or even catch it.

Looking at the woman performing now, delicately plucking the strings of her samisen as she slowly circled about the inn's common room reciting a long, sad ballad, Kane reasoned that it took a mimic to spot a mimic.

There were inaccuracies to the comparison; of course, the world was never so simple as its outer edges appeared. Kane was a mimic in the fullest sense. She could not have sung that sung, but she could stand forth and perform it, having seen it done, an acceptable facsimile to fool the disoriented and distracted patrons as they languished their way into drunkenness. The woman who unleashed her exquisite tones upon the disinterested audience was not like that; she was a true performer. Notes and arias burned out of her, filled with passion and power, music to move men. All this was real, and proclaimed true talent and skill. This lady sang with the verve of a true musician.

The level of emotion was absolute truth. It was the direction that was false.

A song of lost love and lost hope this slow descending score, tragic and depressing, to tear the heart and bring forth tears. The singer invoked these things, a sure demonstration of artistry, but they were a lie. Her desires were the opposite, to reveal and rejoice at destruction and the irresistible pull of fate that overmastered all efforts of men. Hopelessness was her muse, despair her proclamation.

It was a horrible thing to look upon, men pulling their hearts into alignment with the universal plight of mankind in an effort cast down unto the abyss, and Kane quivered with her awareness and the desire to scream defiance at this perverse mockery of music.

She said nothing, remaining wholly silent, knowing with bone-chilling certainty she had traced at last the elusive woman she sought.

At length the sundered melodies concluded and the artiste took a brief round of applause and a far more significant round on contributions. With a smile pleasant and sincere she refused three offers from rich men for drinks or rooms, for she had beauty born of alien allure, and the fascination of the horrific. Kane saw in that smile promises of dread and deranged nightmares. They were lucky she was busy, who knows what awaited anyone who received an acceptance.

A final bow and she left, claiming another destination before the long evening ended.

Kane followed. Not immediately, such an act was a fool's choice, and a good way to get skewered by the entertainer's walking staff. It might masquerade as a piece of wood, but doubtless it was a rare sword to match its tally of blood spilt. No, she waited a space and then left after amiably settling her tab. She even paid with real money, though it would have been child's play to avoid bothering. The tea, for a ninja does not take sake unless in training or the deception demands it, had been good, better than the standards of such a place demanded. Kane cared nothing for culinary achievement, but professionalism could yet wring admiration from her heart.

As she walked down the streets of the small post town she kept to a measured, easy, commonplace pace. Such natural motion would not make her true identity easy to pierce, but neither would it be particularly hard. No extra steps, no deceptive motions or manipulations of chakra to appear especially ordinary were invoked. It was not her intention to sneak up on her quarry. She was not hostile, and such a move might well prove fatal. Indeed, the encounter might be of great lethality even if the approach was as gentle as summer wind.

Ultimately she was anticipated. The singer waited at the edge of town, resting easily against a gnarled tree, aged and wracked with disease. Kane suspected the once vibrant plant was not long for the world. No doubt the other found it comfortable.

The night was not well illuminated, but there were few clouds and half a moon struggled to enliven the gloom with silver reflection. It was enough for Kane's rapidly adjusting night vision to make out the other woman clearly, but to lose some details. There was no way to tell if it was a smile that graced her face, or a frown.

"You did not clap," the woman remarked, idly in appearance, but it was dubious in insincerity.

"Did you want applause?" Kane questioned. "For a sham performance?"

The other woman laughed, and in that moment the lies that bound her up and made her seem nothing more than another kunoichi pretending to be a traveling performer vanished like moonlight before a thunderstorm.

Her singing voice had been melodious, powerful, and grave.

Her laughter was the shrieking of a mad devil. No other comparison sufficed. Kane felt a wave of fear crest inside her just hearing such a voice, knowing the promise of horrors it was prepared to uphold without hesitation.

"You perceive well, and hide yourself from perception equally well," the witch's laugh vanished. "Had you not intended to seek me out I think I might have missed you entirely. Seeing you now, in the losing battle of light, I do believe you were right to do so."

Kane nodded almost imperceptibly. She was not unafraid, that would be foolishness, but she was hopeful. It was no longer belief, it was known: this woman was the person she needed to find.

"Follow me," the false entertainer beckoned. "We need a place to talk."

There was not much of a forest by the post town, a small collection of trees crammed between surrounding farms along rocky land unsuited to rice planting. Scraggly and bent, they were tightly packed together and of an age, planted here together since the last major cutting for firewood and construction.

They found a small open place there, a little circle not much wider than Kane's height, and she was not a tall woman, surrounded by brambles but clear within. The brambles were no real barrier to kunoichi, and the pair stepped inside easily. The performer put her samisen down, laying it against a warped fallen trunk, half-rotted, and then laid back against the same, as comfortable a position as might be had. "Gather tinder and kindling, I'll light a small fire, talking in the dark is boring and makes for poor jokes." She smiled with something resembling honesty then.

Kane did this, the matter of a few moments only, and the other woman lit a little crackling blaze in a space she scrapped free of undergrowth with her staff. She looked upon the flames with strangely childish fascination, highlighting her youth. Kane was herself quite young, but surely her strange discussion partner was not more than ten years older than she. Her greater power, obvious so close, spoke to a deep understanding, and also to the price that might be paid for such things.

Wonder about that though she might, Kane was not worried about price; she suspected she had no way to avoid paying more than there was to give. Such was the way of ninja.

"Well then," the woman looked up from across the fire. Her face was thin and pale, delicate in a way filled with danger, a porcelain doll that might break into razor sharp pieces and cut anyone who handled with anything but the most meticulous care. Her eyes were dark, and the right hidden by strands of black hair masking that side of her face. Only her mouth, accented with bright, artificial coloring, provided a splash of color. "Why are we here?"

"I came looking for the one called Himei Onna," Kane began, unsure of herself now that the moment had come. How do you reveal soul scarring secrets to a complete stranger?

"You have found her," the disguised kunoichi smiled, a predator's glare. "But I am not _called_ Himei Onna, I _am_ Himei Onna. Do you understand?" Her words dripped with malicious emphasis.

Kane nodded. She had no idea of this woman's real name. In the bar she had called herself Maika, but that simplistic reference was clearly nothing more than a stage alias. As one who had worn unending false labels herself, grasping the difference between a label and a name was easy. Himei Onna, horrid though it was, a crude insult meaning shriek woman, was a proper fit.

"Now that you have found me," Himei Onna continued. "Perhaps you'll tell me who you are?"

"Tsuchi Kane," she recited. "Special Jounin, Iwa Village." It was not only said, she took the labeled forehead protector from a hidden fold inside her traveling skirt and let it glimmer in the firelight, revealing the double mountain symbol of her village. It was a powerful thing to do, for to claim that affiliation falsely, to even possess one of the slender pieces of metal when one did not deserve it, was to invite death from almost any ninja.

"In such ways as it is measured, Suna village holds claim upon me," the frightful kunoichi replied. "But between us, this is irrelevant."

Kane understood. She had studied her quarry, knew the shattered ice woman was a shinobi miko, a religious ninja, and had duties strange and tangential to the concerns of the villages. In the distance of the firelight the tangles of bureaucracy unspooled.

"Tsuchi," there was no smile on the other woman's face. "Not much a name that, more like a marker." Her long, narrow eyes peered deep and past Kane's face. "Are you then a recruit, or an orphan?"

The question was well sent, and spoke of quick wit, and words that struck hard. A ninja could earn the name of Tsuchi, the name of the country of earth, only two ways, by foreswearing all past bonds and taking up the village's banner, or being born an unknown, and given it as the village's claim. "The second," Kane answered, with a glimmer of pride. She had cause, having done good service under that name, and it had been many years since she last regretted possessing it.

"So it is," the other reflected, her body relaxing easily as the fire flickered and struggled to live. "You have sought me out, Kane of Iwa," she nodded ever-so-slightly. "That much has been well done, for there is an imbalance cut deep within you, and it grows worse."

So the woman could see it. Kane felt a soft surge of relief; she had not come so far and risked so much for nothing. This dark and destructive creature possessed the understanding she needed, and from understanding came opportunity. Know your enemy. Know yourself. Kane suspected she must do both things at once, and this woman might provide the means. "Can you help me?"

Himei Onna almost laughed, but stopped herself just short. "I can do many things, Kane," she replied, raising a narrow eyebrow. "Whether I will or not is the true quandary."

That was indeed the crux of the matter, as the kunoichi had sensed from the beginning, and feared. How do you ask the darkness to drag you back into the light? She could only hope. Not pray, such an act would be the height of foolishness at this stage. "What will you do?" Kane did not make an appeal, she was a ninja. She simply asked to know.

"I haven't decided yet," a cruel smile, predatory, answered her. It seemed, looking at that quirk of the lips, that it was far easier to smile all the time when one's smile held malicious amusement than happiness. "I want to know the whole story."

The request was fair enough, and Kane had expected something like it. She had not anticipated telling such a story by limited firelight in the middle of the night after a long day, but it was clear the shinobi miko would hear this appeal now or not at all, and as the supplicant there was really no choice. "Where should I begin?" Kane questioned.

Himei Onna's smile this time was not cruel or amused, but held a flicker of warmth, or perhaps curiosity. "Begin at what you believe is the beginning."


	2. 02 In the Key of Regret

In the Key of Regret

**In the Key of Regret**

"To me the start was when I was sixteen," Kane began, slowly, speaking casually, avoiding with deliberate care becoming a storyteller, a skill she knew well. "That was about six and a half years ago now."

Himei Onna nodded, accepted both the information and the kunoichi's chosen method of retelling. Whether or not she was pleased could not be measured.

"I had been made a special jounin only recently, and I could not fight or wield jutsu in the ways of others of that rank," as Kane recited she noticed her observers patience. It was clear the dark miko would wait for the explanation to come, rather than pre-empt with questions. "My skills were not in combat, but intelligence. I have few gifts," Kane, having been raised an orphan, had never been one to praise herself, it invited harassment. "But I have a talent for disguise, for taking on the role of another, and had amassed a substantial record as a spy."

The other woman's eyes bored across the firelight, momentarily seeking after something, and then relaxed again. What they found, Kane could not reckon.

"At that time Iwa had learned that there were major changes taking place in the Rice Field Country, the opening moves to events you surely understand as well as I." The founding and subsequent destruction of Orochimaru's Hidden Village of Sound had been writ large across the ninja world, and deep into the Sand, though Himei Onna gave no sign of caring, one way or another, not that Kane had expected it of her. "At that time though we knew little, and needed to know more. So the Tsuchikage ordered me to go to Rice Field Country, to pose as a rogue ninja, and to join whatever was happening there, so that I might watch and report."

"I do not know how much experience you have with deep cover work," Kane suspected not much, this woman surely could not have the restraint for such methods, her skills lay elsewhere. "But this was particularly high risk even for such operations. Though I knew even then that I would not be the only agent sent, I had the identity of no one else to work with, and no contacts to report to. All returns of information were handled by dead drops in pre-arranged locations. The Tsuchikage showed me great trust in sending me, but the risks were severe." Kane was still proud that she had been chosen for the mission.

"So you joined Orochimaru," Himei Onna remarked. "And you survived to escape him later, an accomplishment in its own right," her eyes sparkled with firelight. "Yet that is jumping ahead. What did you do in his service?"

Kane recognized the unspoken instruction to advance the story, and also the kindness. Nothing in the request required that she comprise Iwa's hard-earned intelligence, which she dared not do. "He made me one of his lieutenants," she might have shuddered at the memory, that cold white-skinned man with the snake eyes presenting her with rank and command in his name, if what had come later had not been far more terrible. "I was not part of his inner circle, and I am glad of that, but I was well placed. I trained other ninja, young boys and girls, working to build their skills for battle." Seeing a silent request in her audience's body language Kane elaborated. "We worked especially on jutsu using sound, techniques that were rare, and used only in rudimentary form by most of the villages. I believed then that he did that to try and make his sound village seem more legitimate, and to affiliate it with an element as the other villages do. Now I am not so sure."

Kane wondered if the other woman would press her on her suspicions, but it seemed to wash over idly. It was hard to fathom, declaring that you had secretly worked as a spy in the service of perhaps the most infamous ninja criminal in half a century and having the equivalent of 'that's nice dear' returned. She wondered if the woman could tell her what it felt like to swim in a pool of blood.

Instead Himei Onna surprised her by directing the conversation forcefully, presciently. "During that research you did something unacceptable."

It had not been a question and looking into those eyes Kane was glad she did not know how the woman had known, even as she was heartened that she had. "I did many things in Orochimaru's service that I regret, but that were part of the mission, things that had to be done." She paused, struggling. She had never told anyone else the details of this before. Not the Tsuchikage, and not any of the other ninja who had tried to help her afterwards. She had known they could offer nothing but the same false platitudes to duty she had given herself a thousand times.

Himei Onna promised something different. Only from one who would not turn away from the darkness might she receive an explanation for what to do when forced to bear it. "There was one thing though, one incident…" Kane stumbled, trying to find a way to explain. "We were working on a new jutsu, a sonic attack, and I developed an idea, something very powerful, but I could figure no way to make it work with chakra, there was no existing means to supply the strength needed. So I went to Orochimaru, he was a genius after all, perhaps he could provide the answer." Her teeth clenched, remembering that snake's smile, his callous look as he considered the problem, the experiment. "He had a solution…he…"

"You killed someone who did not deserve it," Himei Onna supplied, her voice impatient, bored. "They are rare; I would suspect a child, under the age of seven, with one or no siblings, loving parents in the countryside…"

"How could you…" Kane felt horror blossom somewhere deep inside her. She felt suddenly nauseous, woozy, as if the ground were spinning.

"Killing the innocent can open a gateway to all kinds of things," the woman laughed, shrieking in frightful delight, a cacophony of depravity Kane could not answer. "If they were not so troublesome to locate I doubt there would be any left," she smirked.

Hearing the words Kane saw it again, the moment she had relived so many times. All those three years under the white snake's orders had blurred, most of it faded away as all the jobs did, all the assumed names, but this remained as clear as ever. The little girl, wearing a muddy smock, a beautiful little face, streaked with a wall of tears. "Do it," Orochimaru had commanded, and Kane had known he would kill her if she didn't, not out of suspicion, but because he couldn't tolerate seeing what he thought 'weakness' in his minions.

So she had grabbed the girl's mouth with her left hand, silencing the screams, and then plunged in the kunai, between the ribs, ending it in a single blow. Her eyes had been closed, but the bloodstained body in the mud was always there. "Yes, I did," Kane admitted to the miko's triumphant glare, barely glimpsed through her own bitter tears. "A little girl, she couldn't have been more than four."

"There would have been a ritual afterward," the miko's voice carried through the darkness, rasping away the layers of bandage Kane had wrapped about her heart, exposing the wound completely. "To create a link. Blood I suspect, that seems Orochimaru's style."

She did not speak only nodded, and chocked down the bile that flooded her mouth at the involuntary recollection of the salty, rusty taste, the little sake cup carved with the red liquid seals. She would never remove it from her mind.

"Very well," Himei Onna's voice returned to level, bland speech. "And after?"

"You need to hear more?" Kane managed, distraught.

"You are certainly not done telling me," the shinobi miko shrugged.

Gathering herself together again, Kane sat back up, peered for a long moment into the remnant of the flames, the darkness now overtaking them, and continued. "I went on in Orochimaru's service after that. The jutsu worked, though using it always felt a little bit like dying, and I avoided it."

"When I was nineteen Orochimaru mobilized us all, except for the youngest students," Kane's voice steadied, moving into history that was more common, legitimate, away from the intimate moment she could not stand. "He said we would attack Konoha, and conquer it, that we would be ninja lords." Kane shook her head. "He made many promises, that the Sand would fight with us, that he would disable most of the defenders and kill the Third Hokage himself. Most of his followers, the disgruntled young men close to my age, believed this, or even if they didn't, simply wanted to strike at a target. They lacked the patience to serve Orochimaru."

"I had my doubts," Kane explained. "I wasn't sure success was possible, I had memories of the Leaf's ferocity during the war, even though I'd been very young then." Kane recalled those tense days, having sent the message alerting Iwa, but receiving no counter-orders, having no choice but to attempt to aid the attack. "I wasn't ordered to run, and in some ways I'm glad of it. Three years is a long time, and I don't know what abandoning everything before the plunge would have meant. So, I went with the column."

She recalled the marches, the furtive advance on secret routes through the Fire country, courtesy of the knowledge of Orochimaru and other traitors, the lax security overall from the rich ninja of the fat lowlands. Iwa would never be invaded so easily, she'd made sure of that when she came back, the least of the lessons of that campaign. "Orochimaru made me a strike team leader, commanding three platoons, but they weren't the men I knew. My own students and friends had been younger, they'd stayed behind. I still don't know what happened. I suspect most died later." It was regrettable, Kane had not liked leaving so many behind, but serving Orochimaru was a bad gamble all around, nothing would change that.

Looking out in the darkness, her eyes alit by glowing embers, Himei Onna said nothing, casually interested, a story that had happened to someone else. It was amazing, for rumor said this woman had almost caught Orochimaru's deception in Suna, that she might have prevented all that followed save she pursued north instead of south. Where Kane mourned friends left behind, even though she had deceived them completely, the sharp-souled miko was utterly indifferent to the deaths of her own countrymen, perhaps even her relatives.

"You surely know the details of the battle as well as I," Kane continued. "My own part was small and Orochimaru did not tell us the full plan. I attacked, and led my men, and we penetrated well into the city. I don't regret any of that; Konoha and Iwa are not friends after all." Kane felt no trepidation in saying this, even though Konoha and Suna were friends. It would not move the shriek woman to more than amusement. "Then the battle went bad, Jiraiya of the Sannin appeared, like he'd fallen out of the sky, and I retreated."

Himei Onna raised an eyebrow, obviously questioning that simple result. It was a fair gesture, only a handful out of the more than one hundred ninja wearing the sound colors had made it out alive from the debacle.

Now Kane smiled, for she had turned disaster into opportunity that day, and was proud of it. "I found a dead leaf ninja, and dragged his body into a marsh, so it would not be found for months. In the chaos of those days impersonating him was easy. I learned everything about what had happened that day, including how Orochimaru betrayed his servants." She felt bitterness and anger over that. Kin and Zaku, two young ninja she had trained with, Kin in fact a friend, given up for a single jutsu. Such a personal grudge was weakness, but she still hated Orochimaru for it. Damn the snake bastard!

"How resourceful," the miko commented, stirring the embers so they popped and sparked. "No doubt you slipped away easily when the chance came."

Kane nodded, feeling no need to mention that she had been forced to kill her so-called partner from the Leaf to make good that escape. Doubtless the other woman could guess at this and had glossed over it to preserve the deniability of them both.

"I went back to Iwa afterward and things were the same, but not," There was no proper way to explain what home looks like after three years away, three years in which you are neither alive nor dead, but only an agent, drifting in the shadows of the ninja world. "There was praise for what I'd done, learning most, though not all, of Orochimaru's secrets. The Tsuchikage gave me time to rest, to take another duty, almost half a year. I proctored at the chunin exam, a pleasant, idle, pointless thing to do." Himei Onna's biting smile echoed Kane's sentiment.

"That was all fine, but things went bad after I went back on espionage duties," the watcher's face was impassive, though it seemed she must have anticipated they way things were going. "I started having awful dreams, flashes of pain, suffering, death, tormented things, wretched. They would go away wouldn't stop, but only got worse, and I saw flickering images in mirrors, my own face, decaying, distorting, bleeding, and more, terrible things."

Himei Onna put up a hand. "The one innocent girl, or others?"

"Others," Kane answered, and she knew the strangeness of that statement. "I never saw the girl at all, not even in a dream." It made no sense. If she was haunted by a vengeful ghost, and that was surely possible, she had heard of it, knew of jutsu that affected such creatures, why should see only see other people?

The eyes of the miko sparkled with delight at the confusion and pain. "Of course you would not; the truly innocent do not torment their slayers. What of your jutsu use?"

"That is the worst part," Kane admitted. "The rest, it is hard, but all ephemeral, it can't touch me, and I can override it and conduct my duties. My jutsu though, all the sound jutsu, they've changed. Whenever I use the sounds it burns through my body, tugging pulling, like something is trying to jump free with the noise."

"An apt description," the woman's feral eyes held a strange alien hunger now. "Almost literally true, in some sense."

"What?" Kane was dumbfounded for a long moment, and her voice, when it came, was terrified, child-like. "There are ghosts trying to pass through my body?"

"A moment," she held up her hand, close to Kane's face, and the Iwa kunoichi could see the calluses of weapon work there, and the string-work of a musician. "First I wonder. What do you think of your crime? Are you looking for forgiveness?"

"No," Kane shook her head, looking down into dying embers. "It was unforgivable, I had no choice, but it was still unforgivable."

"You had a choice," Himei Onna corrected, almost as a schoolteacher might. "There is always a choice, even death is a choice, but that is irrelevant. What do you seek, if not forgiveness?"

The question was unexpected, strange, both in content and tone. It was forthright in its acceptance of evil, so dastardly open. Himei Onna was not interested in penance, contrition, or even seeing Kane embrace her action, she was looking deeper. "I did that to complete a mission," the special jounin replied slowly, sounding her words out in her own mind, knowing the depths of her listener were not something even a skilled reader as she could plumb. "To serve the village, because serving the village is all I have, then and now. That is my purpose, and I want to fulfill that purpose, and the purpose of this curse, or whatever it is that I have consummated upon myself."

"I see, how very interesting." Himei Onna locked gazes with Kane, pulling her vision into the black morass of her eyes, blotting out flame, moon, and stars. "You are not cursed Tsuchi Kane, you are a conduit," the voice was unceasing, it did not abate or pause for comprehension, but plowed forward heedless of what it buried beneath it. "The ritual you completed used an innocent's loss to access the wrath of the dead, to bind their screams to your sound. Those torments are powerful indeed, and mighty techniques could be built from that."

"The thing you did was outside the natural order, neither yin nor yang, but your regret has brought the yin into you. You are not of the yin, like me, that is not your path. You are a ninja, who stands at the pivot between, as you ought, but you let the yin into you. Normally this would not matter; you would return to yourself, the _I_ overwhelms urges one way or another. Men control their deeds, good and evil. They are not made to do it by forces without. It is your work that sets you apart."

Kane could only partly grasp this and wanted to beg for clarification, but she could not stop or speak against that voice, not in that moment.

"As an agent of consummate disguise you spread yourself apart, becoming different people, different identities, building them and casting them off into the world when they are done like worn kimono. The core is weak, trembling, Tsuchi Kane, named for earth by default, and the chime, which brings sound by letting the wind pass through. You have made a link to the wrath of the dead, and now it is passing through the door you represent."

"It is possible to slam a door of this kind shut, to place a barrier within your soul, but it would destroy the sounds you have developed, and likely you entirely. Beyond this, I would not do it anyway, I find the angry dead screaming abroad an invigorating concept." She laughed then, shrieking at the moon, delighting at the pain of others.

"What will you do then?" Kane demanded, terrified now more than she had ever been before.

"Give you purpose, since that is what you wanted, isn't it?" Her smile then could have accompanied any crime, no matter how terrible. "It is what you expected isn't it? Darkness cannot defeat darkness, but it can be re-channeled. Stay put now. Focus on the embers."

Kane, confused and worried, but committed as she had come this far, did as the yin-soaked shinobi miko demanded. Her eyes bore down upon the red-flecked lumps of gray, watching them slowly fade to nothing, cooling past the point of incandescence, struggling to survive, to burn and devour just a little longer.

Low, beginning in an almost inaudible murmur, Himei Onna began to sing. Her voice held no false sincerity now, only a rebellious revelation of sound and fury as it grew and surged in crescendo. Here was the true music of one who runs before the wildfire and the whirlwind, who has looked to the destruction that complements every act of growth and bowed down before it. Yin energy was essential to the world, the complementary half to the yang, but it was unfamiliar, alien, and in this raw expression, terrifying.

Himei Onna's voice grew, unleashing ancient words that passed over Kane's ear as thunder, her eyes glued to the embers she was unhearing, letting it swirl and settle about her without resistance, knowing the die had been cast, the disguise donned.

With sudden silence the shriek woman's song was done, and the fire died completely.

In darkness Kane looked up to the other woman, stranger now than she had been at the beginning. "What did you do?"

"I have set a curse upon you," she answered, a schoolteacher again. "You will hear the voices of the wrathful dead. In most men this is used to torment them and drive then over the edge of sanity, but for you it should provide a way to channel the darkness within."

"How can I do such a thing?" Kane did not understand, and it was hard to look kindly upon someone whose idea of help was placing a curse upon your soul.

"Use your control over sound," Himei Onna shrugged, curiously amused. "I'm sure it will take some experimentation, but if you give them an outlet, and perhaps targets for their rage, the other manifestations should cease. Regardless, you'll have plenty of time to figure it out, with the effort I expended on that curse it may last for decades." She laughed again, and got to her feet as the sky whirled about her and Kane cowered not in fear, but in awe of the uncanny lack of restraint in the woman.

Himei Onna turned away, slipped through the brambles, and did not look back. Only for a moment in the darkness did Kane see her truthfully; the walking staff she carried was a bloodstained naginata, and the body that outwardly seemed no more than a decade older than Kane's twenty-two years had already begun to crumble from within.

Everyone pays a price, the kunoichi realized again, only some are more willing to charge the account than others.

It was well past midnight, and Kane struggled with exhaustion, but she was not willing to sleep in this clearing, there was no need for additional reminders. She marched herself a short distance through the grubby woodland before collapsing on a bed of moss.

For the first time in many nights she slept without mind-shattering howls invading her dreams.


	3. 03 In the Key of Freedom

**In the Key of Freedom**

The wall, Aimi decided, was not being sufficiently cooperative. It had the gall to be solid in a place were there was otherwise uniformly sorrid construction, and that had shattered the pathetic little training bangles she'd made out of dried and compressed rice and millet. It was back to air-boxing for the next few weeks at least. Well, she considered, maybe they'd get a new body in, and she could con the kilos into sparing with her some. It had been a while since that had happened and no one else was willing, the other prisoners kept a good body length away from her at all times.

Aimi the Elbow they called her, and everyone here had taken elbows and knees to sensitive places far more times than they could stomach. It hadn't won her any friends in the cells, beating the stuffing and occasional meal out of the rest of the prison population as an exercise in training, but it had accomplished things. The reputation kept leering hands and eyes away, it provided a good workout, and, even better, a reason to keep in trim, and it gave her a chance to spend her time working on her skills, not fraternizing with men whose spirits had been crushed. Spirit was one of the few things the teenage kunoichi had left.

Spirit, and a temper that unloaded like a snap-kick to the head.

Two years and running on close to seven months, if the counting of some of the old prisoners was accurate, demarcated the small eternity Aimi had been locked away. A long time when the charges are garbage, there's no end in sight, and you were only fifteen when they put you away. The worst part that it all stemmed from one bad decision, made when she was really too young to have known better. Well, Aimi recalled, maybe not. Anyone ought to know better than to back a snake in life's rat race.

"You are frightened, come with me and I'll make you stronger than fear," those had been the first words Orochimaru had spoken to her; she'd remember them forever, just like the last ones. "A pity, but your once promising development track is now an unacceptable risk that must be contained." She'd given him five years of blood, sweat, and tears, believed fully in the dream of a Hidden Sound Village, and he'd tossed her and so many others aside like bad seed before planting.

Now her dreams had a lot to do with putting several kilos of metal bangle into that white-skinned snake-eyed face. They weren't realistic in the slightest, Aimi wasn't an idiot, but they were certainly motivating.

Breathing deeply she spun herself through another practice routine, going through the endless motions of footwork, arm work, and whole body contortion necessary to her fighting style. Occasionally she used weights made from broken bits of concrete or iron rebar, but she could never really get the balance right.

That was morning practice, afternoons were for jutsu work, which was even more fruitless and frustrating, since she didn't possess the proper tools for sound generation. Despite all that, after two years and seven months of laying waste to air, walls, and any prisoner stupid enough to stay within striking distance, she wasn't the nobody she'd been when packed in the first time. One day, hopefully sooner rather than later, she intended to have the chance to demonstrate it.

Silently, in a place she let no one see deep inside, she finally had hope that it might indeed be soon. Rumor, a commodity that dispersed among prisoners faster than extra rations, said Orochimaru was dead, that the wunderkind Uchiha brat had beaten him. Aimi didn't believe it for a second, two fools that did had ended up half-dead, beaten by Karin, the mewling fangirl appointed by Orochimaru as their warden. She wasn't nearly tough enough to hold the complex on her own, and there were only a handful of other guards here, but Aimi didn't think the moment was right. The snake-man had planted rumors and been declared dead before, and trying to escape and failing was a great way to get slotted for experiments at the north base. Nevertheless, if the prisoners managed to build up the courage for a mass breakout, she'd help this time. Orochimaru couldn't be everywhere at once and once she got out, she wouldn't be caught again.

The sound of footsteps echoing down the hallway didn't stir the kunoichi from her practice. They were coming from the entrance, likely meaning a supply delivery or possibly a messenger for Karin or some other guard. Such distractions weren't worth caring about and few of the other prisoners stirred either.

When there came clear mutterings and loud words from that direction, then Aimi took notice. Something was wrong, for the cells up ahead had been disturbed from the usual reaction. That was always worth looking into.

Aimi didn't move to the wall of bars, but instead drifted back, fading in against the stones. She preserved a clear line of sight that was all she needed. Let the other prisoners be the ones noticed by whosoever had deigned to pay them a visit.

They were a pair, both young men, younger than her even. The one on the inside had a standout appearance, wearing a sleeveless coat with a belt at rib-level buckling a sword almost certainly taller than his own stature. An odd fellow, it appeared as if his teeth had been filed, giving him a crude, animalistic smile. Aimi did not recognize him, something that was noteworthy, for as an actual Sound Village member, and not one of the later snatches, she could at least match the faces of most of the notables to her memory, whether prisoner or guard.

The other boy was a bishounen, with that casual, arrogant way of dressing and walking, the sense of entitlement that Aimi, born to rice farmers in an abusive household, despised. He wore one of the elite sound uniforms as if he were too good for it, coat pulled open, rope bow poorly tied, sword bound in a position from which it would have to be shifted before being drawn. His body language alone was enough to make Aimi feel like throttling him; that he was Uchiha Sasuke made her positively seethe.

Sharingan-wielding snot-nosed insect with a brother complex! You got me stuck in here! Me and everyone else! Sasuke's defection had been the reason for Aimi's prison sentence. The sound-based techniques Orochimaru had given to her and several dozen other youth to develop were a 'threat' to the doujutsu-wielding Uchiha, and for whatever reasons inside his labyrinthine snake-man head Orochimaru had locked that threat away.

She longed for nothing quite so much as to demonstrate just how much of a threat to the Uchiha she really could be.

The other prisoners were talking, babbling really, when one shouted. "Th...That's it! He defeated Orochimaru so, he came to free us!"

The blatant desperation underneath that plea disgusted Aimi, but the thought was intriguing. Orochimaru was nowhere to be seen, and by all indication the Uchiha boy was practically glued to his snakeskin hips. Certainly he had never been among the prisoners alone before.

If Orochimaru really is dead, what happens to us? Aimi wondered, and she didn't like many of the answers. The Uchiha might have defeated him, but running a massive secret organization wasn't just about power, it took real work, and she figured no fifteen year old had that kind of patience. Besides, the medic, Kabuto, wasn't present, and Aimi had watched carefully, it was that one who was Orochimaru's real right hand ninja.

If Orochimaru is dead, this base will surely be found by ninja from one of the villages, likely soon, but how soon? Will we rot and starve here while we wait? Will the villages free us, or put us on trial? Thinking deeper, Aimi realized that those things didn't matter either. If the Uchiha simply ignored them and left, conducting whatever his business with Karin, Aimi recognized the bitch's voice from down the hall, he'd come for, the prisoners would overpower the guards and break free in a matter of hours. So, either he sets us free, we get free on our own from an abandoned base, the kunoichi didn't rate the guard's intelligence very highly, but they wouldn't stick around to be gutted in a riot with this visit behind them, or he comes through and kills us all. It wasn't a matter of ability; anyone who could take Orochimaru on could surely murder a bunch of unarmed, dispirited prisoners, especially if the guards joined in. Aimi resolved that if the moment came, she'd at least give a good accounting of herself.

There was a long period of silence, after the two visitors disappeared to one of the guardrooms with Karin. The waiting was an annoyance, as Aimi had never been a particularly patient person and prison hadn't yet enforced that rule upon her. Nevertheless, she held her body together, despite burning inside.

A single set of footsteps came back, a puzzling thing, and the imprisoned kunoichi wasted long seconds in pointless speculation as the sound approached the cells.

Passing by the corner revealed the boy with the massive sword. He bent down in front of the small door in the bars, and it was clear he was holding the key.

The other prisoners started chattering immediately. Aimi stayed silent, listening, wondering. It seemed they were to be freed, though she couldn't really believe it until the youth opened the lock. She found his request, that they spread rumors of Sasuke defeating Orochimaru and freeing them, of bringing peace to the world, pathetic. That Uchiha punk wasn't ordering them free out of gratitude, or even if he was all that meant was that he was a fool. To a sound ninja he was the reason for her imprisonment in the first place, forgiveness wasn't so easily earned. If he'd really killed Orochimaru though, and Aimi still wasn't sure she believed that, then she supposed he'd done them all a favor. Consider it a clean slate for the moment Uchiha brat, and I hope I never see you again.

The kunoichi shuffled out with the other prisoners, taking in the light of the sun again for the first time in many weeks. It was blissful, but she would not be distracted. Most of the others broke and separated immediately heading for the hills or all manner of destinations. The teenage sound ninja only went about two hundred meters, to hide away in the woods.

It was all very well for the others to flee aimlessly, many of them had homes or villages to go back to, or old criminal friends they could look up. Aimi, having joined Orochimaru after a rogue ninja killed the traveling entertainers who had become her adopted family at the age of ten, had nothing of the kind. She might be a ninja, but she wasn't about to face the world after two years and seven months barefoot in a dirty prison smock. She knew full well that somewhere in that prison complex was food, gear, clothing, and most important of all the special bangles Orochimaru had made for her.

So she waited, hiding in the undergrowth and camouflaged by a bushin that appeared to by sleeping in the trees above. Aimi knew of Karin's chakra sensitivity, but as long as she stayed within a few meters of her bushin the deception wouldn't be detected until Karin was right in front of her.

The trio of young ninja, led by the Uchiha brat, exited shortly thereafter. Karin tossed her an idle glance, but nothing more than that, as anticipated. They headed off toward a road that led north. Going to the north base? Aimi wondered. It didn't really concern her. She had no intention of heading to that hellhole where the snake-man had turned people into monsters. The remaining handful of guards left about an hour or so later, many with heavy backpacks, taking whatever valuables they could bear; a smart choice overall.

When they were gone Aimi headed inside once more, swearing silently that it would be the final time.

There was still light inside, straining from the guttering string of light bulbs wired to the tunnel ceiling. Orochimaru's guards had never been the most diligent of ninja and the long idleness had made them truly lazy. No one had bothered to turn off the generator before leaving. It brought a smile to the kunoichi's face. She didn't mind darkness, there'd been plenty of time to befriend it in prison, but looking for things was easier with light.

The guardrooms within were unlocked, except for one where the door had apparently taken the worse of introductions to the file-toothed boy's large sword. Food was the easiest to find, though there was little suitable for travel and so the raider had to make do with a small satchel of dried fruit and nuts and a handful of rice balls. It wouldn't last but food was not hard to get on the road. Water, next, from the small tank in the deepest of the storage rooms. It was foul tasting stuff, laced with too much iron and a twinge of sulfur, but it had been treated and that was good enough for the moment. The kunoichi filled a pair of canteens, enough for a day on the road, which ought to get her to a town somewhere.

Clothing was more difficult, especially as she was a handful of centimeters taller than Karin, slightly bustier, and carrying significantly more muscle. She also had a real set of hips, unlike the little one in her short-shorts. The consequences of being just a little closer to maturity, but it meant she couldn't steal any of her ostensible warden's clothes. Still, Aimi found a halfway decent jumpsuit in one of the guard's rooms that stretched to fit her well enough, and a judo jacket to put over that. The color wasn't the gray-brown or green she preferred, rather a stony-brown dirt tone, but it would do. She did manage to find a green ribbon to use as a belt, and ninja sandals and a pouch for gear.

The armory, such as it was, did remain locked, but Aimi had taken the ring of keys from Karin's room, so that proved to be no obstacle at all. More significant was the ransacking the guards had clearly conducted on their way out. No that she blamed them; the kunoichi would have done exactly the same thing in their place. Ninja gear was worth good money on the black market, and most of this stuff had been obtained illegally anyway. Despite the damage, a little rummaging was enough for Aimi to requisition herself a set of kunai and shuriken, a bit battered and dinged up though they might be. She added a reel of wire, a file, a few spare smoke bombs, and even a still functioning if scratchy radio headset. The first aid kits had been thoroughly plundered of valuable medical supplies, but there were still bandages, tweezers, and some sterile alcohol available, all in all better than nothing. There were no soldier pills, flashbangs, or the precious explosion notes, however, and the teenage ninja was certain she'd feel the lack before long.

This done there was only the question of her bangles. She had to look hard, and eventually smash down a little bit of false drywall, but she eventually found a crate labeled 'contraband.' Presumably Karin had hidden all the prisoners' specialized equipment from the various lesser guards.

Wrenching the crate open with a kunai Aimi had to paw through an astonishing assortment of ninja castoffs, but she soon found what she desired. Her bangles, and amazingly, the light green gloves and socks that had been tailored for their use. Those didn't fit anymore, but they could be used by a tailor to pattern new ones. Yet it was the wheels of metal that the kunoichi treasured above all else she had found combined.

They were not ordinary bangles, indeed most people would have likely though them machine parts instead of something to be worn. They were massive. The wheel rim was as wide as her hand was long and the diameter close to the width of her head. The metal ring itself was thicker than her thumb. Altogether they were obviously weapons, not stage tools, when worn. It was not just size that made them special, running her fingers over the surface Aimi could feel the precision construction and honeycombing that would build and carry sound and chakra, making them weapons of jutsu far more deadly than simply bone-breakers. They were heavy and solid, being made of rare metals including titanium alloy. Holding them again after over two and a half years the kunoichi felt restored as a ninja.

Finding her long lost weapons put Aimi in a better mood than she'd been in months. She made a point of turning the power off before she left.

Staring at the setting sun from atop a nearby hill, the teenage ninja considered her options. They were not exactly voluminous. Hidden Sound was well and truly dead, and now Orochimaru, who had operated what was actually a truly massive hidden remnant order, was gone too. Even at its height the village had been fake anyway, possessing no true authority. This left Aimi without any standing in the world of the ninja, she was a nameless rogue with no village to vouch for or protect her. No contacts in the outside world to provide work and wages either. Not that she really needed a job, exactly, she could steal most anything she needed from peasants and townsfolk who would never now, and was a good enough performer to get some extra money that way. She wasn't looking at starvation, and with no one looking for her disappearing into the background of the world would be easily.

This prospect, while comfortable, wasn't enough. Such a life would be merely surviving, and Aimi had spent two years and seven months learning just how unsatisfied that made her. She would not go back to a form of prison, no matter how comfortable it might be, she was going to remain in the world of the ninja.

Firm though she was in her resolve, there were significant difficulties. Aimi might be able to find work as a rogue ninja, the other prisoners had often explained how there were always jobs in the bigger towns, but that was a very dangerous path, it meant going up against better prepared and outfitted village ninja, and eventually some one would get you. Trying to join a village was another option, but she knew that times were hard in many places and recruiting was no priority. Further, she had no real accomplishments to her name, no way to impress a Kage that she would be useful. She had information on Orochimaru, which, up until today, could have been very useful leverage, but no longer.

I really don't have any good choices, Aimi recognized. I could really use some help. Two ninja had a markedly better chance of surviving than one, and the number tended to increase until you built up a crowd. The kunoichi had no friends among the prisoners from the south base, she'd intimidated them all too much, but she realized that might not be complete destitution. Orochimaru had broken the group of sound users up, to keep them from communicating and working together. Likely some survived among the other hidden outposts, and several had been friends.

Aimi would not head to the north base, she wanted no part in that place or Uchiha Sasuke, but there were other locations, including a base to the west that she had once been too. If it was still there, and prison scuttlebutt suggested it was, she might find something useful. If nothing else, the kunoichi acknowledged, it's some place to go.


	4. 04 In the Key of Duty

**In the Key of Duty**

The office of the second Tsuchikage reflected the man who occupied it. It was not old, but ancient. The walls were old stone, taken from deep quarries long ago, the furnishings polished antiques, each certainly well over a century since they had been made, the lighting fixtures observed a style a good five decades extinct, everything in this place did not change, and neither did the man who sat behind the desk.

How old he actually was Kane did not know. No one in the village did. The information, like almost all the personal details about the man, had been erased from official records, and the only one old enough to remember had the rank to ignore all those questions. Outwardly he looked as if he was already entombed, his face buried in wrinkles and lines, limbs creaking and skeletal, hair gone save for a few wild wisps of white, a man slowly crumbling. You thought he was a dried up specimen, a barely warm body sticking to the Kage's desk simply because no one had yet decided to remove it. You thought that, Kane knew well, until you saw his eyes.

Those eyes were pure crystalline force, diamond hard and with furious inner fire, they could pierce souls. Anyone who met the eyes of the ancient ninja behind that desk understood that though the body might be weakened, infirm, the mind beneath them had faded nothing from the master schemer who rose to power as a mountain rising from the sea five decades before. Over that long half century hundreds, thousands of ninja had passed beneath that gaze and been examined by that gem-sharp mind, and very, very few had come even close to matching it.

Kane was a rare Iwa ninja in that, while she feared, respected, and admired the old man as they all did, she also loved him. It was a distant, careful love, the emotion of a granddaughter for the old war veteran grandfather who doesn't play nice with others but tells the stories that make the heart thump and the stars close. Having no parents or other relatives, the constant leader was the closest thing to a family the ninja spy possessed, and perhaps the only person she had never tried to deceive.

The Tsuchikage was not a man who wasted time, especially not in his twilight years, and so he had picked up and read through a brief report in the slender space of time between his last appointment leaving and Kane entering his office. He sat in a grand padded armchair, an antique masterpiece that probably fetched a price close to a small house. His visitor stood, there were no other chairs and the floor was hard stone, uncarpeted.

"Special Jounin Tsuchi," the Tsuchikage began, putting his report down. His voice was laced with age, but it was still sturdy, forceful, commanding. "I have not seen you since you returned from your leave. I trust it was successful?" He looked fully on her now, looking both over and past her at once, taking a measure, though precisely of what Kane could not have answered.

"Yes my lord," she replied, though with limited enthusiasm. "I believe so." It had been only four days since her eerie visit with Himei Onna, and though things seemed better, other unexplained events were happening; she was still adjusting, trying to understand what new whispers might mean. Traveling would likely be different than staying in the village, but she had only returned on the evening before the last.

"Good," he noted. "I would hate to have someone of your particular talents impaired." That was about as much outward concern as could be expected, but Kane remembered that the Tsuchikage had been there to help her struggle with the dreams and apparitions, and had suggested her course of exploration.

"Do you have an assignment for me my lord?" Kane was somewhat worried about this. Did she dare enter a major operation not knowing how the curse would affect her?

"Possibly," he replied cautiously, letting her stew for a bit. "Information just came in today, on the morning radio communiqué from an agent in the Rice Field Country."

The kunoichi's attention perked up immediately. Iwa had spies everywhere, most of them not even ninja, simply passing along what they heard, but there was hardly ever any important news from that region, as there were no villages there. Anything of significance from that country surely had to do with Orochimaru and his remaining followers. "What's the news?"

"A rumor has begun," the Tsuchikage smirked. Usually rumor was a terrible information source, sometimes though it was outrageous enough that it just might be true. "It claims Orochimaru is dead, killed by his protégé Uchiha Sasuke."

"Impossible," Kane replied immediately, and when the Tsuchikage's mouth twitched she added information that he full well knew, she'd reported it to him herself. "Uchiha Sasuke had a cursed seal, at this point it would be almost three years, he couldn't have lifted a hand against Orochimaru without falling over with violent nausea at the least. I saw what happened one time when Tayuya got into an argument with him, he barely had to raise a finger."

"True," the Tsuchikage replied. "That would be the case for a normal subject, but the Uchiha are special, and besides, perhaps combat was not involved."

"What do you mean?" Kane didn't quite understand. Orochimaru was certainly not the kind of person you'd manage to assassinate in his sleep, even if you were his pupil, he was far too paranoid.

"Your reports and others indicated that Orochimaru had some strange jutsu involved with anti-aging or perhaps soul transference. Pictures you obtained prior to his attack on Konoha compared with some taken by observers in Rice Field afterward indicate differences in height and profile. If he had a method to take over the bodies of others, couldn't he have used it on the Uchiha?" the Tsuchikage did not smile, it was an impressive bit of reasoning, but the thought wasn't comforting to consider.

It could be possible, Kane had to admit. Orochimaru had certainly been obsessed with the idea of death. It had figured into almost everything he did, so that everyone around him noticed it, and if you took a look at some of the nasty secret experiments he did with that crazy Kabuto it was even more obvious. "So he's faking his death? His ego…I just don't see it." Orochimaru was the man who had sent hundreds of people against an entire village for little reason other than to prove he was better than his master. You didn't walk around looking like a big white snake when you had a huge price on your head without being more than a little full of yourself.

"I agree," the elderly kage nodded slowly. "So the rumor might just be true, might it not? Perhaps something happened during the absorption process, something involving the sharingan that no one could have anticipated. Accidents happen, even to, no," he amended with a grim smile. "Especially to men who think they are immortal."

"Is there nothing more to go on?" Kane wasn't sure why the Tsuchikage was telling her all this anyway, intelligence gathering, not analysis, was her specialty. She wasn't about to give it anything less than her best effort though.

"A small thing," the old ninja added. "A man in the wave country reported two young men crossing the Great Naruto Bridge; one of them matches Sasuke's description."

"The other could be Orochimaru in disguise," Kane responded, though it was still an impressive bit of intelligence.

"No doubt most other villages will think so," now the Tsuchikage did smile. "However, thanks to your report the other young man matches the description of Hoozuki Suigetsu, formerly of Mist Village."

That was one Kane did remember, a savage little child with inhuman teeth and an inhuman temper. Where Orochimaru had gotten him she didn't know. That training him to discipline was impossible she did, having been forced to try it herself some four and a half years before. The little hellion wouldn't respond to anything but intimidation, which he wouldn't take from a woman, and had a massive bloodlust to boot. Her report had been part of the evaluation that got him put in a tank in the first place. He was one of the people of Hidden Sound she didn't regret leaving in the slightest. "Orochimaru would never appear as him, and I can't think he'd let him just walk around with Sasuke either. The rumor could really be true." Kane recognized that the Tsuchikage had known of this second report all along, and that he had been leading her. She didn't bother to guess why, having learned long ago that it wasn't worth the effort to try and determine the old Kage's motives.

"So it would appear," he chuckled just a bit. "Even if Orochimaru is only incapacitated temporarily and Sasuke has simply fled, the former Sannin's organization is surely going to crumble at this news. This brings us to your assignment."

"What do you wish me to do?"

"When you initially returned from the attack on Konoha, you reported that Orochimaru had instructed you to research sound as part of an effort to legitimize the false village he was making," from another man this might have seemed like rambling, but any Iwa ninja understood that the Tsuchikage was carefully building to a point. "However, we now know more about his deep connections with the Uchiha, both of the survivors, Sasuke, who he acquired, and Itachi, who he apparently consorted with in the past. It is suggestive of an alternate purpose is it not?"

"He wanted to build weapons against doujutsu," Kane finished, voicing a thought that had been worming through her mind for a long time.

"It seems a high probability," the Tsuchikage's old face twisted into a leering grin. "Now, knowing that, and knowing Orochimaru's genius, if the Uchiha boy has truly become so strong, might it not avail us to acquire some of those weapons?"

"You want me to…" Kane could not fully believe it. She could not even manage to voice the thought.

"Special Jounin Kane Tsuchi," the old voice filled with officialdom. "You are ordered to travel to the areas where Orochimaru was known to have bases, and their environs, and seek out any former hidden sound members you believe suitable for recruitment into Iwa's ranks. You may present the offer only, the acceptance must be voluntary, no coercion, and I desire the services only of those you knew personally while serving undercover in Hidden Sound. There will be no unknown quantities."

"Understood my lord," Kane felt her spirits soar. She had always regretted those left behind, especially the other kunoichi, who had been few in number under Orochimaru's service and so had mostly been friends. Tayuya and Kin were dead, and Kane had always considered that a failure, but now she might have a chance to make up for it. "How long will I have for this mission?"

"You will need to return to Iwa in one month," the Tsuchikage's voice was iron. "Past that point any survivors will have dispersed too far to continue the effort," He gave Kane a diamond hard look that froze her heart for a moment. "I do not consider the success of this effort particularly high, Special Jounin Tsuchi, so do not risk your person unduly. I may need your special talents in the near future."

"I understand my lord," she repeated. "I will depart before the evening meal." She wanted to leave immediately, but there would need to be some fairly complex preparations beforehand.

"Very good," he ordered. Then his expression softened oddly, becoming almost familiar. "I would rather not press this on you so immediately, but time is of the essence in this endeavor. So, I have a small gift as consolation for cutting your leave short."

Kane was stunned. A gift? The Tsuchikage did not simply give things away to his ninja, certainly not without formal ceremony. She knew quickly that it was not kindness, but his personal influence over the effort she had just concluded. Himei Onna had had her say, and now the Tsuchikage would have his.

With his left hand the old ninja opened the drawer of his desk and took forth a small item, grasped with the firmness of a much younger man in those gnarled fingers.

It was a bell, a little thing about the size of a woman's fist, pure and smooth. It was composed of some pure white metal she did not recognize, and had a fine, fluid line. It did not appear that it had been refined at all after being cast in the mold, as the metal was completely unmarked in even the smallest way. The curve of the hemispherical design was fluid and flawless, a masterpiece of elegant simplicity.

The Tsuchikage shook his hand only once, striking the small clapper against the edge of the strike ever-so-slightly.

A brilliant, perfect note sounded, high and ethereal, beautiful.

Kane felt that note, that perfect tone pass deep into her, as if she were listening with some more than her ears, something deeper was hearing, and that sound was the only thing that penetrated.

"Keep it," the Tsuchikage pushed it towards her. "I think you will find it an aid."

She reached out quickly, before her could pull his hand back, wrapping both of hers around his own as she grasped the little bell. "Thank you. Very much."

Quickly she stood, saluted, and then turned to go. She did not want the Tsuchikage to see her cry, and she was not sure if she could hold back the tears.

"Dismissed," he said quietly to her retreating back. A quirky smile rested on his lined face.


	5. 05 In the Key of Restraint

**In the Key of Restraint**

Stamp. Stamp. Stamp stamp stamp. S-st-stamp. Mao smiled, a false smile, but she was at least a bit amused, finding a tiny fragment of beat in such a pathetic task as stamping food crates. A crude, pathetic job that in her opinion could certain have been done by a monkey, or perhaps a decently bright rat, but one that she was stuck doing instead. It was one of the many aspects of her current life she really hated, but that didn't go away. Prisons did not run themselves, certainly not prisons stuffed full of half-human barely sane experimental castoffs. No, the slightly saner, passably human, potentially loyal castoffs had to serve as guards instead. One set of rejects guarding another.

It was a prison of its own, the world outside the bars, as far as Mao was concerned. The only real difference was that the food was better, you could stretch your legs occasionally, and someone would pay for a new pair of sandals every once in a while.

There came a howl from somewhere down in the maze of hallways carved into the hillside. It also means that, when there's a riot, you actually get to fight with weapons, Mao reminded herself. Not that it really changes the chances of being killed.

She was worried about that now, very worried. The last supply run had brought rumors, as it always did, but this time it had brought a really bad one. Orochimaru was dead they said, killed at the hands of Uchiha Sasuke. Mao didn't believe it for a second, but others would. She didn't like thinking about that.

When the rumor had come in the kunoichi had told them to suppress it, to use every tool available to squelch the information, but they hadn't listened. Mao wasn't important, a leftover piece of sound village that'd only kept out of the cells by using her feminine whiles on the big snake boss' glasses-wearing attendant. She was least among the guards here, despite being older than plenty of them and having served Orochimaru longer. So they hadn't listened, and without draconian measures to enforce silence it was already starting to leak out.

The charge about the feminine whiles was true; unfortunately, Mao had been just a bit luckier than everyone else trained to use sound jutsu. She happened to be beautiful. She didn't regret it, you were a ninja, you used what you had, but she still didn't have her proper weapons, just kunai and shuriken, and those wouldn't carry the beat she needed. It was very worrying.

Two years and nine months before there had been similar rumors. Mao remembered those days, even though most of the others didn't. This place hadn't changed much since then, still left over experiments and poor souls with cursed seals stuck to their hides locked away. They'd let those rumors stew for a while then, and then they'd rebelled outright.

Orochimaru's followers had won the battle that followed, and Mao had been there, had led platoons of ninja, young teenagers just like her, and had been blooded in battle for the first time, and had seen horror and loss. All because it was believed that the white snake had been killed in Konoha.

But we had the Sound Four then, Mao remembered. Jirobou, Kidomaru, Sakon, Tayuya, they came to our aid and turned the tide, Orochimaru's bodyguards. Who would come now? Mao had known the Sound Four, Tayuya had been her friend, she'd searched for the body when she'd died, even against orders, but the Leaf had taken it away. Now she thought that was better, this place was not where you wanted to be laid to rest.

The most important thing though, was that there would be no help this time, not unless Orochimaru came himself, and he wouldn't. The lives of the guards meant nothing to him, or the experiments. I doubt he even cares about Juugo, Mao speculated, and he's the source of half of this anyway.

So the lovely kunoichi prayed, to any god that might be listening, that the prisoners did not believe, that they stayed in their cells, and went about her business.

She did not neglect, however, to make a few contingency plans.

The young lady's prayers would not be answered. A revolt began in the early afternoon, heralded by the blaring alarm that some poor guard no doubt managed to press before being eviscerated.

"It's the cursed seal prisoners!" guards yelled as they mobilized, charging through the labyrinth of corridors. "Get down there, we have to contain this!"

Guards ran through the cement hallways under flickering lights, gasping as the generator warred between alarms and normal power.

Mao didn't follow them.

Containment was impossible, that was her verdict from the beginning, and once an outbreak began there were no good defensible positions, Orochimaru hadn't bothered with such extravagance during construction. They were outnumbered substantially by the cursed seal candidates alone, never mind the other prisoners. So she had a different plan.

The kunoichi's body was notable for completely unmarked skin, she had not a single mole, freckle, or scar from training, perfectly and flawless, men found it rapturous. She knew it to be unnatural.

Guards they might be, that hadn't spared them from the knife and pills of the experimenter. She had simply gotten lucky, whatever had been tried on her had only this mildly pointless impact, and the side effects could be controlled by taking medicine.

Kabuto had tried to use that medicine to control her, but many of the prisoners here were smart, and Mao had made friends with a few judicious gifts. She'd learned what went into that concoction and had a secret formula to make it herself. There were no barriers to her escape, least of all some vestige of loyalty. Who would follow a man who took everything from you including your very skin? She was leaving.

Making the decision had been easy, carrying it out was not. The other guards would surely kill her if they understood her intent to desert, and the prisoners would kill her regardless. Worse was that Mao knew she wasn't leaving without her weapons. They might be gifts from Orochimaru, but she needed them, she wasn't much of a ninja without them. They were a part of her that wasn't staying behind.

That was one errand to make, but there was another, an old debt that needed to be repaid, and perhaps to gain a better chance of survival.

That one was even more dangerous, but she did not flinch from the task.

Even knowing the passages from almost three years of living in them, the north base was still a maze, and running through it quickly was simply not an option. The turns were too sharp and too often to make any great time. Mao knew her destination, but the screams mounted through the complex as she made her way there as fast as she dared.

She was at the correct section of cells, rummaging through the guard table there, now abandoned in the riot, for the keys, when it proved to be not fast enough.

"A pretty one, heh," the voice from behind her was guttural, distorted, and laced with pain.

Mao turned with the ring of keys in hand, to face a massive man, his body crawling with black marks like worms, spreading and digging further and further. Those were the signs of a man in thrall to a cursed seal, and close to reaching level two.

"Come here pretty one, let's have some fun," he growled, pawing at the air.

"Come and get it if you can," Mao spat in return.

The man growled, and launched into a lurching charge.

Kunai and shuriken were poor weapons against a cursed seal thrall, the former lacking reach and the latter unable to do sufficient damage to the hormone-crazed state. Fight that way and Mao recognized she would likely lose. Of course she had no intention of fighting that way. Cursed seals might make men strong, but they also made them stupid.

She tossed the ring of keys into the air, it's rattling and jangling served to draw attention for a critical moment while she moved.

Timing her breath for strength the kunoichi launched a massive kick, not at her enemy, but at the sturdy guard table, sending it tumbling down the hallway towards the rumbling remnant of a man assaulting her.

He smashed through it with his left shoulder, breaking it into splinters and then bringing up a ludicrously powerful right hook into the open space behind, no doubt anticipating Mao would try to strike from behind the momentary block to his vision.

Stupid, she chuckled silently as she emerged behind the man; having rolled past the fool in the moment his attention was focused elsewhere. Spinning to a stop she turned her whole body about and launched it up from the floor.

Mao's right heel slammed around in a brutal kick to the back of the neck.

"Damn!" she hissed at the impact. It was like kicking a wall, and the sandals didn't help in the slightest.

Painful though the move was, it worked. Bones cracked. The sensitive vertebrae in the back of the neck unable to take the strain inflicted upon them. Cursed seal or no, spinal column damage dropped even the strongest to the floor.

Mao spun about after her kick, coming upright again and only now drawing a kunai.

Sprawled before her the unfortunate experimental subject groaned in unexplainable pain.

The kunoichi's kunai rose and fell a single time, and the groaning stopped. Mao considered it a kindness.

Knowing she had to hurry even more now, Mao scooped up the keys on the run and hurried down the hallway.

In the south base, and elsewhere, prisoners were kept in group cells to save space and effort. Not here, they were too unstable and dangerous for that. Everyone had their own individual cell. Normally it could be a nuisance, but today it made Mao's task much easier, and she knew exactly where the cell she required stood.

She felt a moment's hesitation as she put the key in the door. There was really no way to anticipate what might happen when she opened the door, what the girl on the other side would do. Prisoners here hated the guards, and they surely had cause. Do I really trust her? Mao wondered in a moment of indecision. Then she stopped. No, if she tears my throat out that's a better way to go than from anyone else here.

The key turned with a resounding click.

Mao pulled the door open towards her.

A small black haired girl lay in the cell, sitting quietly against the wall, making seemingly idle hand motions over and over again in the dim light. A moment later she turned her head, staring at Mao with a quizzical look in her dark brown eyes. "I wasn't expecting you, Mao," she spoke softly, kindly. "My apologies."

Mao smiled slightly in spite of herself. Those manners, the schooled etiquette more common to a woman over twice the seventeen year-old's age, were utterly disarming sometimes, but she quickly shook them off. "Get up Rio," Mao spoke forcefully and quickly. "There's a full scale riot going on." She held up the bloody kunai for emphasis.

"Is there?" Rio tilted her head, standing smoothly without perturbing her dirty prison smock in the slightest. "It does sound like it. They've all decided to believe Orochimaru really is dead then?"

"Maybe they've just decided he's a little busy," Mao groused. "It doesn't matter, since we won't be alive to find out if we can't get out of here!"

"We?" Rio questioned innocently. "You intend the two of us to escape together?"

Mao felt her anger rising. She really did like Rio, prisoner or not. The two had been friends before everything had turned bad, and she owed the younger girl. She'd failed her before and she wasn't about to do so again, but she could sometimes be exasperating. "Yes we!" Mao looked at her, imploring. "I need your help Rio, I don't think I can make it out alone, and I'm not leaving you to die here. If Orochimaru's really dead all this is over, so let's forget it and get moving."

"Certainly," Rio answered amiably, and she stepped lightly from her cell. "Where to first?"

"We need to get into secure storage," Mao was speaking partly to herself. She knew her weapons were there, and, thinking on it, probably Rio's too. They were both sound ninja, and needed them. "Then we make a break for it."

"Please lead the way," Rio motioned with her right hand, delicately, as a maid might.

"First," Mao pressed a pair of kunai on the other kunoichi. "Take these."

Rio nodded, and stepped up to one pace behind on the right, a decent covering position in these tight passages.

They advanced together, going not outward, but deeper down into the complex. For the moment they were away from the fighting, that was all closer to the entrance. The kunoichi could hear the screams and howls coming down the twisted hallways, and it was clear it wasn't going well for the guards. It was Mao's hope that the experimental subjects would turn on each other if they finished with the defenders, kill each other off. That would make escaping far easier. She didn't think it was all that likely though.

The secure storage room resided at the end of a long hallway deep in the bowels of the complex. A single guard usually stood watch there, handling anything that had to move in or out. Mao breathed a little easier as they rounded the corner. She'd feel much more secure with proper weapons in hand.

What she saw made her gag.

A pair of men, transformed fully by cursed seals, their bodies twisted and wretched, unable to handle the release of energy, crouched on the guard's desk. Blood covered the chaotic spray of protuberances, horns, and barbells hanging off their bodies. Yet the worst was what was in those tooth-filled mouths.

Oh gods! Mao's mouth hung open and she choked back bile in her throat. They're eating him!

The two man-things, not truly men anymore, turned at the pair of newly arrived ninja. Their eyes held no soul, only hunger.

It was not a battle Mao wanted to fight, against two man-beasts in a straight hallway. The lack of maneuvering room played to strength advantage of those with cursed seals, and with her enemies so far gone, she suspected they could be killing things well after they were dead. "Rio, we should fall…" she began.

"Kill the lights," the small kunoichi said with her voice in a whisper.

"What?" Mao turned to stare at Rio even as the two bestial foes began to stalk toward them, reptilian.

"Kill the lights, make it dark," Rio stepped forward slowly, walking idly, a kunai in each hand. "Then step back around the corner and wait."

Mao remembered then, and she realized what Rio intended, but it didn't make her happy to think about it. Still, there was no real choice. "All right."

She jumped up, easy for a tall woman like her, and slashed her kunai across the ceiling wire, cutting the circuit.

The long string of bulbs guttered and died. Darkness cloaked the hallway.

Mao turned about at the corner, holding still with her back to the wall, and prayed.

Ting. Ting. Ting.

It came rhythmically, the sound of Rio striking kunai against kunai. It was a weak sound, impure, but it was sound, and that was all Rio would need.

Man-beast slavering filled the air, and then the kunai rang again, and then again.

There was a sudden rash of noise, grunts of pain and a howl of agony, a flurry of movement.

The kunai clanged again, and their timbre was slightly different. To Mao's practiced ears she knew that meant blood now covered the metal. "I'm all done Mao," Rio's voice, perfectly composed, came from down the hall.

"Right, I'm coming," Mao answered, pulling a flashlight from her pouch. The generator the complex used was lousy, so all the guards carried them regularly.

The beam of light was feeble enough, batteries limping along, but Mao could see Rio standing in the middle of the hallway, surrounded by a pair of bodies, stabbed with expert precision in multiple vital places.

Inadvertently she raised the beam to catch the small ninja's face. Even knowing what she would see, Mao had to hold in a tiny gasp.

Rio's eyes were jet black. The flashlight beam moved away without producing any reaction, and Mao knew Rio could not see it, could not see anything in the darkness. "Hold on, I'm almost to you."

"I know, I hear you," Rio answered, still perfectly composed.

"There's a lantern in the storage area," Mao added, still a little uncomfortable. "We can dissipate this darkness using that." It was one thing to understand Rio unique situation intellectually, even to see it used in practice or ordinary prison life. Seeing it unleashed in battle was different, it made the little ninja, normally so small and helpless-looking, totally different. One more of Orochimaru's experiments, Mao recalled. It made her wonder if Rio was truly stable. It doesn't matter, she told herself. A debt is a debt and a friend is a friend, and we're all a little crazy after spending a few years in here.

With a brief period of searching, and Mao kept talking idly, nonsense, throughout for Rio's benefit, she found the keys and undid the complex lock on the storage room door. The room beyond was not large, and it was filled almost to the ceiling with crates, boxes, and simple piles of junk. The remnants of years of secret operations, all the things too important to discard, but for some reason or other not in use, resided here.

The gas powered lantern was thankfully just to the right of the inside door, and Mao had it lit within seconds, filling the small space with real light.

Behind her Rio inhaled and exhaled slowly, deeply. Turning about the kunoichi saw color and normality slowly return to her companion's eyes. "Are you all right?" she asked before she could call the question back.

"Perfectly fine," Rio replied, her voice in complete control. "It's normal."

"Very well," Mao answered, realizing she shouldn't probe. "Just so long as everything's okay. Let's find our gear. It's probably in the back, under everything."

"Right, we should hurry," Rio added, and began rummaging.

As Mao predicted their gear was indeed in the back, under everything, but in a testament to the greater organization and diligence of those earlier days, it was also clearly labeled on the outside of the crate. Thus the retrieval only took a few minutes.

The pair of kunoichi pulled the crate out; ignoring the vast tumbling pile this created behind it and wedged the top open with a pair of kunai, almost hungry in their anticipation. It was everything Mao had hoped to find, though the contents would stir sad memories along with the happy ones. She had to blink back tears at some of the things they tossed out to the floor.

Rio's Katabagoto, her strange blade harps, like massive, flattered kunai with a serrated edge of the inside and a long, smooth blade edge on the outside, nasty weapons designed to slash and tear that always looked so huge in her hands, lay on top. Though kunoichi had traditionally wielded weapons of such design, Mao suspected Rio was the only ninja to ever have thin metal strings fashioned to the upper side of hers, forming a surface rather like a miniature koto on each. The narrow, sharpened metal finger picks that were needed to safely use the strings were tied to the paired blades by a thin cloth thong. Rio wasted no time in breaking that clasp and putting them on once again.

Mao's gear was at the bottom, and she had to dig past an amazing assortment of weapons and accessories, all designed in some way to produce sound that might be used as a weapon. All locked away when Uchiha Sasuke turned sound from solution, to problem. Those weapons brought great sadness to Mao, for the ones who should wield them were gone, either dead, if lucky, or turned to monsters far around the bend of insanity. She would have preserved the devices if she could, but there was no good way to carry them, and time was of the essence.

At the bottom of the crate rested a pair of long, high metal boots, with heels that clicked and clacked just as Mao remembered. Her boots, and beneath those the pentagonal shield and long narrow blade, called a rapier, that had come into Orochimaru's hands by way of a wayward assassin. Her sword and shield now, deadly weapons and also deadly instruments of sound, used properly. She recalled those tricks, and had more than a few new ones to try, ideas carefully groomed over the long imprisonment.

"Here Mao," Rio said as the older ninja stood. "I found some useful items."

Rio shoved a crate filled with all the essentials of a ninja's day to day operations, kunai and shuriken, wire, scrolls, first aid kits, smoke bombs, flash bangs, explosion notes, soldier pills and the rest over to Mao. There was also a very fine pair of binoculars resting on top. It must have been misplaced there, for she was sure it was custom made. She pocketed that too, it was certain to become useful, along with a decent supply of the essentials. There was no food or water available here, but that was a problem for later, and a solvable one, Mao knew. "Let's go," she told Rio, picking up the lantern.

They walked back out to the comfort of electrical lights, and the screams picked up again. The howls too, and those were by far dominant.

"What is our plan of egress Mao?" Rio asked, as if merely curious.

The taller ninja grimaced. "There's only one exit, so we don't have much choice. We'll wait until the fighting has died down as much as we dare, and then try and break through really quickly." It was the best plan she could think to use, options being limited.

"And if Juugo is at the main gate?"

"Oh," Mao hadn't considered that. She had almost forgotten how much more dangerous that one would be compared to however many marauding man-things. Juugo was just as crazy, but his insanity was more mature, more likely to pursue and hunt them down. Together they might, might, fight him off, but she knew they both had close range fighting styles, and that was the wrong way to go against him. "Do you have a better idea?" she asked Rio.

"There's only one entrance, but there is not only one way out," Rio said quietly, musing. "This complex is laced with airshafts that lead to the surface, it had to be. Many of them, blasted in a hurry, are passable for humans."

They weren't easily passable, Mao thought, but Rio had a point. Still… "Those shafts are a maze. People have tried to escape through them before, but you get turned around and end up trapped and starving. Even this lantern'll be almost useless."

"Bats can get in and out of far worse tunnels and so can I," Rio spoke in that almost whisper again.

Mao looked down, meeting the small kunoichi's eyes, trying to read her, to make sure she was sincere. "Only if you're certain about this," she cautioned.

"With your help, yes," Rio answered.

"Alright then," Mao was hesitant, but at least no one was likely to follow them there. She could only trust that Rio truly had mastered the curse Orochimaru had inflicted upon her. Otherwise she was looking a really lousy way to die. Better than being eaten though, she recalled suddenly, sickeningly, and that decided her.


	6. 06 In the Key of Disgust

**In the Key of Disgust**

One of the amazing aspects of technology, Mao considered as she tugged in gulps of truly fresh air not stained with the smell of rodent urine, is the ability to record the absurd. Specifically the six hours her watch decreed the two kunoichi had spent crawling through air shafts on their way to the surface. The better part of four of those had been spent in darkness, with only distant flickers of light from the sun far above occasionally leaking down after her flashlight had died.

Despite this difficulty, Rio had kept her word, and now they were outside the north base, high up on the hillside, free.

"There's no sound, Rio noted, after reorienting herself to seeing again, her eyes restored to normal. "Does that mean the fighting's stopped?"

"Maybe," Mao replied, not truly convinced. "Let's move over to the ridge there and we should be able to see the entrance. We need to find out if these hills are going to be crawling with escapees." It would be criminally pathetic to go through that long struggle in darkness only to die by being caught in the open.

With Rio following, Mao made it to the edge and looked down at the distant entrance, probably almost a half mile away now. "Damn," she whispered, taking it in.

"A strange thing indeed," Rio commented from her right.

It was very strange, far more than Rio's quiet words indicated. A vast mass of bodies was laid out there, perhaps as many as one hundred in all. Taking out the binoculars, Mao scanned over them. "It's all the inmates," she informed Rio. "Looks like the vast bulk of the seal bearers. The guards must be inside, but it's funny, all these guys, it looks like they were fighting their way out, not against defenders on the inside."

"I think someone arrived to stop them," Rio said simply, and pointed.

Mao followed her extended arm to locate a little cluster of four people, standing well out of the way of the entrance, but otherwise gathered idly. "So it would seem," she echoed Rio's comments as she adjusted the focus. "There's three of them in a row, and one across, if they move a little I can get a better look."

As Mao watched the four seems to finish talking and they jostled about

subsequently, giving her a chance to recognize them. "Gods! It's Juugo!" she blurted.

"Considering the others aren't dead they must be somewhat substantial," Rio commented. "Can you recognize them?"

"Let me see," Mao bit her lip and focused her vision. "There's one girl with them, I think, yes, it's that annoying little Karin from the south base. One of the boys has a huge sword on his back but his face is oddly familiar," Mao knew she recognized it, but from where? Then she remembered. "It's Suigetsu, that boy from Mist, but I thought he was at Kabuto's lab, it's really strange."

"Not if Orochimaru really is dead," Rio noted, and Mao had to admit that was certainly true. All sorts of things would have shaken lose if that happened.

"The last one, he's acting like the leader," Mao considered this. "A pretty boy for sure, and he's got an odd concealed sword on his back," she turned those words over in her mind a second time and it was unbelievably obvious. "It's Uchiha Sasuke!"

"Is it?" Rio squinted, and Mao offered her the binoculars, but the small kunoichi brushed them away. "I've barely ever seen him, I doubt I would recognize him, but if he really is here, and Orochimaru and Kabuto aren't, then Orochimaru must really be dead."

Thinking on it Mao realized Rio had to be right. "Orochimaru would never have let Juugo out or Suigetsu for that matter. Karin was a loyalist. She wouldn't leave the South Base without some kind of proof. He must really be gone." It was hard to accept, Orochimaru had controlled Mao's life for seven years, everything that was not her childhood. She'd thought of him as immortal, that he would control her life forever. With him gone, she'd have to try and find a new path again, and she'd never be able to make him pay for locking her up in the first place. It was unsettling in the extreme.

"Should we go after them?" Rio questioned.

"You want to try and join the Uchiha's little band?" Mao looked at her. It seemed absurd, but looking deeper, perhaps Rio was right to be open to all options. Somehow though, it was impossible for the older kunoichi to even consider working with Sasuke. He was the reason Orochimaru had thrown her aside in the first place, her and Rio, and so many others. Many of those, old friends, had died because of it. No, she wouldn't work with the Uchiha; they had something of a score to settle. Not right now though, Mao recognized. "Let them go Rio, I'd sooner punch Sasuke, and Juugo too, than chat with him, but we've other things to worry about. Besides, Karin will sense us if we try to get close."

"So what should we do then?" Rio was completely deferential, it was impossible to tell what she thought at the response.

Mao pointed back to the mass of bodies. "It looks like Sasuke must have handled them, but maybe there's still someone alive inside. I'm not going to leave any guards or anyone else who's halfway sane, down there. Besides, we should be able to find food and clean water too."

"Right," Rio nodded, and began looking for a good course of descent down the steep hills.

It took them a few minutes to make it down, Orochimaru had chosen well in making his base inaccessible, but they were still ninja, and natural obstacles were not a significant problem.

Rio walked fearlessly up to the first of the bodies, a seriously cut man lying prostrate on the stone. Mao recognized him as one of those unfortunate bandits who'd gotten too close, and had ended up with a mark on his neck as the price of that mistake.

"He's still alive," Rio remarked, touching the body. "Bleeding, but there's no wound to any critical areas."

"What?" this spun Mao about and she strode over, needed to confirm the diagnosis herself. She was no medic, but the prison work had exposed her to plenty of dying and dead people. A short examination proved Rio was correct, the man was not dead, or even precisely dying of his wounds. He was very seriously injured though, as anyone would have to be to have been knocked into immobility while in a level two cursed seal state. He was bleeding slowly but freely from several places, well into a state of shock, and probably suffering from head trauma and dehydration. Mao took a quick glance at the sun, now setting, and shook her head.

"What is it?" Rio asked from two bodies over. "I think they're all like this," she added quietly.

"All of them?" Mao got up and followed Rio for a bit, recognizing what had happened. The Uchiha, and perhaps the boy Suigetsu, had cut these men down while deliberately fighting not to kill them. It was very impressive as a feat of combat, but it also sickened the teenager. "They deliberately cut these men down so that they would not die, and then left them to perish." She shook her head. "It's already cooling down. Most of these men will be dead by morning, the rest by tomorrow night. Without medicine, I doubt more than one mends on his own."

"We can't heal them," Rio said without enthusiasm or without sadness.

"No, we can't," Mao agreed. Even if they could administer medicine to so many, and Mao doubted their ability or the presence of supplies to achieve it, they were afflicted with cursed seals, by saving them the kunoichi would only be digging their own graves. "That Uchiha brat is either an idiot, or a sadistic bastard cut from the same mold as Orohcimaru." In some ways, Mao thought the first would be the worst. That someone would do this to their enemies in the false belief that it was mercy was a degree of blind selfishness that she simply could not comprehend. She sighed, understanding what had to come next. "I guess we'll have to clean up that brat's mess, curse him," she drew out her sword. "Are you willing Rio?"

"I will help you," she pulled forth her own blades.

It was swift, systematic, and unsentimental, quick little thrusts to the neck or the heart, and each act finished one. Mao gritted her teeth and worked through the tears, thankful for Rio's help and that it only took a few short minutes to complete. She was glad they were all still unconscious, having them thrash or moan, which would have been the likely case a few hours later, would have been far worse.

"We'll worry about the bodies later," Orochimaru's actions might have reduced these men to the level of beasts, but she wouldn't leave them to rot as beasts if she could help them. "There may still be guards, or stable prisoners, alive inside."

"Should we split up?" Rio asked when they passed through the entrance and saw the charnel house it had become.

"No, I'd much rather have you with me," the kunoichi suppressed a shiver.

"So would I," it was a rare moment of human feeling from the little ninja.

The dead were mixed together inside, additional prisoners, Mao reckoned there ought to have been about sixty more all told, only half of those with cursed seals, lay along with the fallen guards. Between the two there would be close to another hundred bodies in the complex if everyone was dead; a huge problem.

The heaviest fighting had taken place close to the entrance, in the first block of cells where the riot had apparently originated. That helped a little. Unlike outside, most of those within were actually dead, perhaps only one in four was wounded. It made for less to sort through.

The level two cursed seal provided a degree of durability, and some extra body mass with which to absorb wounds, perhaps half of the wounded were of that kind. Mao and Rio put them down like the others outside. Eventually, they found a few guards, and apparently a group of prisoners who had decided to stand with them, who were still barely alive. One, a young man now missing his right arm, was semi-conscious and recognizable. "Hidoshi!" Mao called to him, bending over him and gently slapping his face toward wakefulness. "Hidoshi! Wake up, you're bleeding! Wake up!"

"Ugh…Mao," bleary eyes looked up at her, not quite focused. "Am I dead? No one…no one saw you…"

"I snuck out," she brushed past it, needing information. "Hidoshi are all the survivors here, in this corridor? I need to know, I want to help you."

"Made…last stand…" he managed the words slowly, garbled. "Dragged wounded…with us. Most of them…got bored…went outside…must've…smelled something." He seemed to gasp for breath. Mao struggled, tearing pieces of clothing off the others, to bind up his wounds as a start. "Boy…funny teeth…came after…said…free Juugo…killed Iwata." He could not point but his eyes moved. Mao followed that gaze and saw another guard, a man she'd always thought was a jerk who leered too much, with his chest sliced cleanly in half. It was obviously the work of Suigetsu, with his massive sword, and clearly no act of mercy. Strange, she considered. Outside they didn't kill anyone, but in here, he lost his temper? She did her best to file that away as something to remember, who knew if it might turn out to be important.

Hidoshi collapsed, unable to say anything more, and Mao knew she had to act. Of the twelve wounded men here, a quick scan suggested four, maybe five, were lost causes, but even with her limited medical skills it might be possible to save the others. "Rio," Mao's voice rose. "Go down two halls on the right, smash the door and they'll be a guard post there. Tear the sheets off to make blankets, and then grab the first aid kits from the closet. Bring them back right away."

"I understand," Rio's voice and manner displayed no emotion, as if she didn't care in the slightest. Her companion's reticence was strange, but as long as it was not opposition the older kunoichi didn't care. She got to work on her desperate task. I will save someone, she told herself, if nothing else, so I can prove I'm a better person than that damn Uchiha, that I still have some ninja pride!

It was a very long night, and Mao and Rio got hardly any sleep, but they stabilized six of the prisoners, lost one to sudden bleeding, one to something Mao didn't understand, and had to mercifully end four, knowing the infections and internal damage could not be stopped. It seemed, in both their estimations, a job well done. No doubt a trained ninja medic could have done more, but among Orochimaru's servants only Kabuto filled that role, and he wasn't around.

Rio set a pyre up outside, during the night, and gradually went back and added wood and bodies to it. There was a long way to go with that yet, but it would get done, eventually.

Shortly after dawn, Hidoshi, now awake and reasonably stabilized, for beyond the lost arm he had only bruises, told Mao she needed to go.

"I can't leave all of you," she retorted reflexively.

"You have to," his voice was scratchy, raw, but he was adamant. "That smoke can be seen from a long way, someone will come to investigate, and you shouldn't be here. The villages will capture you."

"They'll capture you to," she managed, though it was not fully convincing.

"That's a given," Hidoshi managed a half-hearted smile. "At least we'll live, you've helped Mao, but we need proper care to avoid disease. Besides, we aren't friends, you don't owe me. Take Rio and go, I promise I'll forget it all."

"It seems wise," Rio added from behind Mao. "These are not terms we want to meet other ninja under."

Mao was hesitant, not out of kindness but a sense of responsibility. She hadn't cleaned up after that brat Sasuke just to let it all evaporate. There were six lives at stake here. "You're sure?"

"At this point what can you do that I can't?" Hidoshi reminded her.

"Alright," she acquiesced. "Take care of yourself, and the others."

Rio had already packed a small sack of food and a supply of water, so there was nothing else to keep them. As they left, Mao refused to look back; she would not second guess her choice now.

"We're exhausted," she noted only a moment after they started walking.

"Yes," Rio replied, not seeming to make much of it.

"In two miles we can manage a campsite in the woods and collect ourselves," Mao offered, and the younger ninja nodded, accepting the course.

"What do we do after that?" she questioned.

It was a very good question, and no immediate answer came to mind. Freedom had seemingly been dumped into their lap, but it hadn't come with a roadmap. Mao had held minor leadership positions before, but she'd never had to make the orders up, just follow them, so she was uncertain. It was good to have Rio with her, but also a bit troubling. It was obvious her slightly younger companion was no longer normal in the traditional ninja sense, and that would present its own challenges. "Karin was with Sasuke, so he must have already been to the south base," Mao started thinking out loud. "But he didn't have anyone from the West Base with him," that wasn't particularly surprising; it was a smaller installation with fewer potent ninja. "Maybe we should head that way. There's a chance of meeting some old companions, and besides, I think things might be a little quieter in the west."

"That's reasonable," Rio managed by way of agreement.

It wasn't a permanent plan, Mao knew, but perhaps it would give her time to put something together. First though she had to decide what she wanted, and maybe even more important, what Rio desired.


	7. 07 In the Key of Reunion

**In the Key of Reunion**

Aimi had spent a decent amount of her short life traveling, and it had taught her at least one truly significant thing: the road system of the ninja countries was absolutely awful. It was designed that way, of course, the ninja avoided building up the infrastructure so that they, with their vastly superior cross country travel methods, would be able to outmaneuver anyone else, but it was still a disgustingly huge hassle, especially when trying to be covert. Jumping from tree branch to tree branch might get you across country really fast, but it also got you noticed by every bird, squirrel, and bored human for hundreds of meters.

So that pretty much axed it straight off Aimi's list of travel options.

This more or less left the roads, since to try and bushwack across rice fields, through forests, and over often very hilly terrain was more trouble than it was worth. She bore up with it under good spirits, but it was annoying that it would probably take twice as long to get from Orochimaru's south base to the west base on the Fire-Waterfall border, than it really ought. That was her end of the day feeling, in the mornings she consoled herself that it wasn't like she was really in any hurry.

The Fire country had certain advantages to the traveler, at least, and Aimi was glad of them. There were pleasant forests, happy people, and lax security. People looked more nervous than she remembered from her last significant travels almost three years before, but they remained relentlessly optimistic. A bit of this attitude even bled off onto the kunoichi, who despite being jaded by the better part of three years in prison remained a teenager. She was free, Orochimaru was apparently dead, and things really were looking up. Loneliness remained a concern.

It hadn't been something she expected to be a problem, but the young woman found that not being around people after years stuffed into a cell with over a dozen required some adjustment. It wasn't like she was missing friends, but she was missing the presence of others, and the general sense of intimidation she had not realized she had become used to engendering. Complaining about travel sores to trees did not bring the satisfaction of complaining to some quivering lowlife life who would beg you not to slam him up against the bars.

This helped propel her onward to her destination.

The road, really little more than a wagon track through the woods, leading closest to Orochimaru's base came up from the south. Aimi moved along this pathway with a lengthy, confident stride that chewed up the kilometers swiftly. She regularly passed people as a result, and had gotten used to saying pointless pleasantries while assessing other travelers momentarily for threats and then swiftly leaving them behind.

A woman journeying alone was probably the least common traveling group, but it was not impossibly rare that seeing such a person was unremarkable. So when Aimi came up on one such person she did not initially think it anything. As the distance separating them narrowed it was obvious there was no one else on this particular patch of compacted soil and the other woman's movements marked her out as dangerous. Female samurai being so rare as to be almost non-existent, another kunoichi was a distinct possibility. Shifting her bangles, she studied this voyager intently, worried about what would need to happen in their inevitable encounter.

As the gap closed it became obvious the other was certainly a ninja, she was dressed, though not in any village uniform, in an outfit only a martial artist would wear. Pale gray socks reached up to the knee from the sandals, padded for protection. From there up was bandaged, transitioning to a simple sleeveless kimono just below the waist. This garment was a faded dark purple color, somehow familiar to Aimi, as was the knotted cloth headband of the same, wrapped into short, scraggly dark brown hair. Gray bandages could be found on the arms again, wrapping completely around the left hand, but only extending to the wrist on the right, a mismatch that tired the eye to stare at. There was the hint of thin shinobi mail underneath the kimono as well.

All this made a profile achingly familiar to the young escapee, but she could not place it, the mind's ability to identify a person from the back being pathetically weak compared to its recognition of faces. It was obvious to her that, despite the inner voice that counseled not bothering a kunoichi on business in any way, Aimi would have to look back at that face. She took some solace in the woman being slightly shorter and less muscled than her own frame, though somehow that seemed wrong to her remembrance. The woman wore no outward weapons either, only the usual ninja gear carried in satchels belted around the back. If necessary, the first strike could be seized using her bangles, which had the advantage, awkward though it sometimes was, of being worn at all times.

The other woman, well trained, did not look back as footsteps approached her, but her body tensed ever so slightly, shifting weight to readiness, knowing that a ninja battle was most often decided in the very first movements. Aimi moved slightly to the left, a proper way of passing by.

Courteous, the other woman stopped a few seconds before she would be passed, and stepped aside. The teenage kunoichi's pace did not vary as she walked on past. Only her head turned, just enough to force a clear glimpse through peripheral vision.

The shock was enough to make her stumble.

A forehead protector rested on the front of that purple headband, and the metal plate was marked with a simple, instantly recognizable image:

A musical note. The symbol of the Hidden Village of Sound.

Aimi caught herself in mid-motion and reflexively fell into a fighting stance, even as her eyes dashed about over this other woman, and bolts of recognition detonated inside her brain. "K-kiriko?" she spoke, half whisper, half gasp.

The other kunoichi had stopped and was giving the teenager a steady, far more methodical scan, as if merely confirming something she had already discerned. "Aimi," she said with a soft smile. "It is Aimi isn't it? You've gotten a good bit taller haven't you?"

It was impossible, the young girl's brain kept trying to tell her this as her heart pounded and leapt for joy. The paranoia born of long, cold months of captivity asserted itself, and she simply stood pat, instead of leaping into an embrace. It could always be a trick. Reflexively she kicked a little of the road dirt toward this strange apparition.

"Wise of you," the other woman muttered, looking somehow proud as the dust settled onto those socks. It helped to prove no henge was in use; otherwise it would have passed through to skin hidden beneath.

"You can't be here," it was intended to sound intimidating, but came out only confused. "Kiriko's dead!"

The other kunoichi's smile dimmed slightly, her eyes looking just the slightest sorrowful. "That is certainly true, in a manner of speaking," she began. "In another sense it might be more accurate to say she never existed at all." Slowly, carefully, moving in no way to be threatening, the right hand reached up and tapped the little metal plate on the forehead.

The image flickered, twisted, and then the sound symbol melted, to be replaced with a jagged double polygon.

Aimi knew that symbol, and it was not the symbol Orochimaru had devised, not the sound village insignia that she had also once worn. This woman who had stepped out from memory unchanged now bore the double rock crest of Iwa, the Hidden Village of Stone.

"I don't…understand…" Aimi shivered, her bangles rattling in tension, anger building. Desperately she tried to process what she was seeing. The woman looked exactly like Mansugane Kiriko, a kunoichi who had served as a sub-captain under Orochimaru, who had been her sensei and her teacher, the leader of so many of them who had worked with sound jutsu. She had been among the big snake's loyal followers, devoted to the dream of the new village. Kind but dedicated, many had admired her, and they had all missed her afterwards. "You went to attack Konoha. You died there. You died!"

"Did I?" this strange impossible, inconceivable, woman, gave a quirky smile, though there was pain behind it. It was obvious she did not like what was happening, but somehow she found it almost hilarious. "What ninja hauled my broken body back for you to see?"

Aimi's anger was building, and she wanted to spit back something awful, but those words stopped her cold. They were the iron truth. No one had found Kiriko dead. She had simply not come back, like almost all the others. Everyone had assumed she was gone, for the Leaf had not taken any prisoners, and so those who had not come back had surely not survived.

She lives, it was impossible to accept anything else, there was a flesh and blood woman standing in front of her, and looking close the young kunoichi realized that she was not exactly as she hade been before, she was slightly older, matured. "You survived, and you went to…join…Iwa," even as the words spilled from her mouth their illogic un-pealed with absolute surety and from this the truth materialized, a shattering of glass. "No," Aimi's breathing heaved in and out, chakra burned in her. "No, that's wrong. You didn't join Iwa after the attack. You didn't leave us to join them," her voice distorted, her bangles struck together, ringing without her realizing it. "You were always with them, the whole time, you were Iwa," she growled. "Iwa, Iwa, not Oto. You…you…you were a SPY!"

The older kunoichi took a slow, single step back, and there was fear and something else, an emotion Aimi's raging emotions could not name. "Are you going to hit me with those bangles of yours Aimi?" she asked disarmingly.

"Hit you!" she raged. "Hit you! I ought to bash your skull in! You betrayed us, it was all a lie!"

"Betrayed you?" there was a slight, regrettable head shake. "Perhaps, perhaps." Then she raised her head, and stared directly into the younger kunoichi's eyes. "But tell me, has Orochimaru been loyal to you?"

Slicing her legs clean off with a sword would not have dropped Aimi to the ground faster. She collapsed without tottering, simply falling away into a graceless heap.

The kunoichi's world went white and empty for a long, expansion-less moment of absolute solitude. Illusions she had carried without realizing did not shatter, they vanished, and she was left empty.

Kiriko reached out a hand to the fallen ninja, tapping on the shoulder ever so slightly. "I'll ask you again Aimi, are you going to hit me with those bangles of yours?" she gave a little frown. "If you do, I'll dodge, and run, and you'll lose me somewhere in the forest, unless you've somehow become a master tracker in the past years, and then you'll be wherever you were before and I'll be slightly disappointed. If not," she paused, her expression changing to something careful, serious, and measured. "Then we have things to talk about."

Those words offered no solace, but a measure of solidity, anchoring the youthful ninja in the wasteland that remained of her world. "I won't attack," she responded, amazed that she was not sobbing, not quite understanding that. "Why should I? Iwa's not my enemy, I don't have any enemies, I'm all alone, no friends, no foes."

"So Orochimaru's death wipes the slate clean?" Kiriko looked at her. "A reasonable viewpoint. Not everyone will agree of course, but it is a place to start." She paused, and then pointed to a log on the side of the road. "Let's go sit down, this may take a while."

"What? Your voice-" It was stunning, for it was not just the voice, but all the little mannerisms of motion and expression. Everything twisted, leaving Kiriko to vanish and something else, someone else that Aimi did not recognize to take her place. "How did you do that?"

"Not a jutsu," this stranger who wore Kiriko's appearance replied levelly. "If that is what you were wondering. Long practice and a dose of natural skill," she gave a little, professional smile. "It's something I've gotten rather good at." She walked as she spoke, drawing the young kunoichi with her, setting the down by the roadside in a somewhat more comfortable position.

"You aren't Kiriko anymore," Aimi observed, finding it felt better to confirm this aloud. "Who are you?"

"The name that resides on the Iwa roles is Tsuchi Kane," this woman, Aimi was still not sure how to deal with her shift of identity, answered. "It is the closest thing I possess to a true name, and it is as Kane I speak to you now."

"Kane, Kane," the teenager turned the word over in her mouth, struggling to reconcile this new, different person with her old sensei. It was difficult, to look at this woman who had Kiriko's appearance, even wore her clothes perfectly, but yet was not her. "Why are you dressed as Kiriko?"

"So something like this would happen," Kane answered softly, seeming a bit uncomfortable. "Will you let me explain Aimi?"

She nodded, information, even if she couldn't trust it properly yet, would be welcome, something to strengthen the tottering world.

"You think I betrayed you, and you are not without some cause," Kane began, her voice easy, used to telling long speeches, something that Kiriko's had never been. "But like everything involving Orochimaru there are no simple answers. I don't know precisely where to begin." She paused.

Aimi waited, wondering what this strange woman would say first.

"Perhaps with Mansugane Kiriko," there was a sour smile. "She was a real person you know, the basic parts of her story were not fabricated. There was a chunin by that name from Hidden Waterfall, she was raped by her jounin sensei, and she fled the village." Aimi recalled that story, one that they had all heard from rumors, probably spread by Kabuto, and no one had ever asked Kiriko about it. "She did not actually survive. Her sensei tracked her down and killed her. Iwa learned about this, and I chose that identity to adopt when beginning my mission. Orochimaru was too smart to simply create a chunin from vapor."

"So you took her identity?" it stuck Aimi as extremely morbid.

"In some ways impersonation is actually much easier than creating a completely new entity," Kane explained. "Kiriko was seventeen and a half, a little more than a year older than I was, but otherwise assuming her identity was easy. My hair is not naturally brown, but then, my hair is not naturally any color anymore." She cracked a wan smile. "Her eyes were brown, and mine are, well…" Aimi watched as Kane reached up, and in a flawlessly smooth motion pulled a pair of contacts out, revealing green eyes. "But this is easily remedied."

"You wore contacts the whole time and none of us knew?" even seeing the degree of change in this woman as she had switched from Kiriko to Kane, it seemed difficult to believe. How had no one, including Orochimaru and Kabuto, extremely smart people, managed to notice?

"Even among the paranoid, you cannot watch everyone all of the time, as much as you might wish," Kane's voice was somber. "Orochimaru's order was riddled with agents; you may recall I uncovered a pair myself. Once a persona has been properly established and proven loyalty, and I did horrible, horrible things to prove it, not only will tiny slip-ups be excused, they will not even be noticed. Human perception is easy to fool, if you know how."

"So you fooled us the whole time?" it was not a remark filled with gratitude.

"No, I fooled Orochimaru, Kabuto, and some of others," Kane shook her head back and forth. "Mansugane Kiriko really tried to serve Hidden Sound, trained you, befriended you, and worked with all those young ninja that had been gathered up. She just happened to worm out a few secrets and dropped regular reports to secure dead drop locations."

It seemed sincere, Aimi had to admit, but she was not prepared to believe this doppelganger just yet. "But you left, you left when it would have mattered most."

Surprisingly, Kane nodded, and her body seemed to draw inward. "I never wanted to leave you behind. I knew I would have to leave eventually, there were plans for that. You probably won't believe it, but I even hoped to bring some of you with me."

"Bring us out?" that was hardly believable, who would have accepted cast-offs from Orochimaru.

"I can't give any evidence, and it was not defined, but I was close to some of you, and those bonds to carry over. A false face can be left behind, but people cannot be forgotten so easily," she grimaced. "You feel betrayed, but it isn't easy to betray either. I had wanted to, at the very least, save Kin, she fought for so much, so hard, and we were close. I wasn't able to."

Aimi remembered Kin, hard-lipped, tight-faced, and full of fire. They hadn't been friends, being more like rivals. She had spared with Kin perhaps half a hundred times, eaten with her, played pranks on Dosu together and gotten pummeled because of it. Then she had gone to Konoha and never come back. "I suppose I can't blame you for those the Leaf killed."

"The Leaf?" Kane's body shivered, and then she clenched her hands together, her voice tight. "I suppose I should have anticipated this. He wouldn't have told you, and he could have kept the Sound Four quiet."

"What are you saying?"

"Aimi," Kane's voice was low, miserable. "You obviously understand some things about Orochimaru, based I what I know he probably locked you up, maybe even experimented on you after Konoha, but that is not the full extent of his rotten heart." She paused, considering how to proceed. "I survived the attack on Konoha only because I disguised myself as a Leaf ninja after we lost. I learned things while in that dangerous position. During the fight with the Third Hokage Orochimaru resurrected the other former Hokages to fight for him. He had to use live sacrifices to do that. Kin and Zaku served as sacrifices for that rite."

Those last few words were difficult to hear, it was said so softly, but they struck the teenage kunoichi hard. Yes she knew Orochimaru hadn't cared for them personally in the slightest, he'd locked them up and poked them with needles and everything, but human sacrifice? How could you weigh the entire life of a ninja against one jutsu, no matter how powerful? Denial failed, it was not easy to accept but Aimi knew, in the smoldering dark core of her being she comprehended the truth of this. The snake man had betrayed them all absolutely. "It seems harder to blame you for not coming back, if you knew about something like that," she was glad it had happened so long ago, the passing of time was a welcome distance.

"I had no way to free anyone," Kane grimaced. "Had I returned could I have helped any of you escape? Would you have followed me? The Tsuchikage, well, I do not know what he thought about the plight of Orochimaru's minions, but Iwa could not send forces into other countries without starting a war no matter what. It was an impossible mess," she raised her head and looked straight at Aimi's face, moving slowly closer. "Now though, maybe I can help make up for things a little."

"What are you suggesting, why did you come looking for us, just because Orochimaru is dead?" Obviously Kane would know this, the rumors would spread like wildfire, and everything she'd said made Iwa look very well-informed. The teenager suspected they likely knew more than she did.

"Will you answer a question of mine Aimi. Did Orochimaru really imprison you in one of his bases?" it was not meant to probe, her words were soft, careful.

"He did," the young ninja offered nothing more in response.

"And the others, the other sound jutsu users?"

"I think so," she wasn't precisely sure, information had been scarce. "Either that or experimented on. I know some are dead, but I was at the south base, what happened elsewhere I couldn't say. I think he would have though, we figured it out in prison, he was afraid we'd hurt his precious Uchiha." Aimi smirked. "I guess that wasn't a genius move."

Kane laughed, lightly, almost giggling. It was different than Kiriko, but somehow still familiar, a strand of a deep echo freed in the moment. "How true, but what Orochimaru though dangerous the Tsuchikage thinks might be very useful. There is the reason," she reached back and pulled something small, a handful, from one of the pouches on her belt. "If you want this, Hidetsugu Aimi, you can have it."

A slender band of cloth, made strong but not smooth, imprinted with a little plate of metal. There was a marking of a double symbol, a stone and another. The symbol of Iwa, Kane held a forehead protector just as she wore.

"You want me to join your village?" she said it only to buy time, it was too impossible to believe.

"If you'll swear loyalty, then yes," Kane replied. "It will be probationary; you'll have to earn your place, but yes, the offer is open to you, and any other survivors of Orochimaru's madness we manage to find."

Aimi looked down at the little bit of metal and cloth, so meaningless, and yet so significant. She probably ought to have considered the matter long and carefully, but she simply looked once at Kane and asked a single silent question. Do I have any better ideas?

A second later she snatched the forehead protector. "I accept."

Kane smiled, genuinely, for the first time. "I'm glad. I was worried there would be no one left alive, that this mission was a fool's errand. Now, at least one positive thing has come out of all Orochimaru's madness."

"We'll see," Aimi replied, smiling herself, but feeling weird, amused and buoyant. "You haven't finished explaining things to me yet, but I have one question first."

"And that is?" Kane did not seem surprised, and Aimi recognized that prison might have changed her, but it hadn't made her unrecognizable.

"Why were you on this road?"

"This is the best way to get to Orochimaru's western base, and the west is closest to the Earth Country, where I started out," she answered, all business.

"Good," the teenager noted. "I was headed that way."

"How convenient," Kane did not share Aimi's enthusiasm. "I suppose that means there was no one else at the south base then who might be worth searching out."

"Oh," she had forgotten the other woman wouldn't know. "Sorry, the brat, Sasuke, he came by and let all of us go. He took Karin with him and everyone else dispersed to the four winds. I think they were headed to the north base, but I didn't want to go there."

"Why not?" Kane asked curiously.

"He ran all the experiments out of there, after, you know…"

"I see," Kane's eyes narrowed. "Well, we may need to go there anyway, and since you are an Iwa ninja now, you'll have to follow my orders. I may not look like it, but I rank as a special jounin. For now though, the western base is the best chance."

"I understand," she didn't much like the idea of following Kane's orders, the woman still looked too much like Kiriko, and it would be easy to fall into old habits. You're not my sensei Tsuchi Kane; at least, you are not yet. "Let's get moving then, I don't think we need to stay seated."


	8. 08 In the Key of Accomplishment

**In the Key of Accomplishment**

The forest thinned out near the Waterfall country border, in the northwest section of the Fire Country, as the soil grew dry and the hills grew tall. Sturdy pines and spruces took the place of the broadleaves in turn, making what forest there was darker than the ones that preceded them.

To Kane the forest change was of little import, but the hills were comforting. She had mastery over only very limited douton jutsu, but the enclosing boundaries of ridge and draw offered tactical options to a mountain-bred Iwa ninja that simply did not exist on flat ground. There was a simple earthy security such a person would draw out from the land, heartening the ninja who grew closer to home.

A quick glance at her companion indicated that she was experiencing no such similar reaction, not that Kane had expected it. As a deep cover agent she had perforce pried clandestinely into the pasts of all the youths Orochimaru had gathered together, though it was often difficult to recall specifics. Nevertheless, she remembered that Aimi was born of Rice Field country, a mostly flat coastal plain, and doubted she had ever really been to the mountains in her life. Whatever the impact of the landscape change on the teenage kunoichi, Kane could read no alteration in her forceful, directed, stride.

It was difficult for the special jounin to reconcile her memories of the mostly happy, smiling child of fourteen with the quick dance moves and snappy retorts with the forceful, temperamental, and touchy teenager who had emerged from Orochimaru's warrens. She had expected differences, but nothing in her broad experience had prepared her for the alterations that Aimi's psyche had clearly had to make just to survive. That she was now taller than Kane and a muscled athlete who walked so fast the older kunoichi had to significantly increase her pace just to keep up did not help.

I left children behind and have come back to get ninja, Kane reminded herself. I must work carefully, but effectively, Aimi may be stable compared to anyone who went through Orochimaru's experiments and survived.

"What do you think we'll find at the West Base?" Kane offered as an attempt to bridge the silence that had no stretched for some hours after they had finished their respective explanations early in the walking.

"Who knows?" Aimi's voice was rather bored. "There weren't supposed to be many prisoners there, between two and three dozen according to the last punk who got transferred over to us, and only a handful of guards. No Sasuke to bust them out though." She took on a quizzical expression. "If the base is abandoned, or controlled by the prisoners I suppose we can just walk in, but what if the guards are still in charge?"

A village-trained ninja would never have phrased a question on combat procedure in such a way, Kane recognized, and she understood then that while Aimi might no longer need training in jutsu and the arts of fighting, she still had much to learn in order to properly function as a ninja in many settings. "We will reconnoiter beforehand," Kane began in reply. "If there is opposition present we will make plans according to the situation. It will depend on who leads the enemy force, their numbers, and their deployment."

"Heh, I suppose," Aimi shrugged. "I wouldn't really mind fighting, I haven't gotten to wear these," it was obvious she was referring to the impressive bangles. "For years."

Kane kept her face steady, but inwardly she scowled a little. That Aimi was not the little genin she'd left behind was clear simply from movement and bearing and for all her bravado the Iwa agent recalled the careful approach when they'd initially met, but it was impossible to gauge what she was truly capable of without a test of combat. It was a test that the kunoichi would prefer to leave off for a time, especially as she was not particularly gifted in the arena of stand-up fights. Only a fool fights fair, one of her teachers, an experienced former agent, had given her that advice as a child, and she hadn't forgotten.

"We'll fight if it is the best option, or if we're forced to it due to a mistake," Kane admonished, but lightly. "A ninja never fights just because they want to, that's what rogues do. Besides," she shared a depressing notion. "With Orochimaru dead I think we may soon see far too much bloodshed."

"Maybe," Aimi's voice was somber. "Combat was a part of daily life in prison though, so I'm on edge with all this quiet."

"I understand," Kane smiled a little. "I think you're adjusting quite well." She recalled the power of small complements from her days teaching Aimi and so many others. It was a faint hope, but still alive, that even a handful more survived, somewhere in this rough land Orochimaru had dug his roots into.

They walked along in silence for a time, only holding a brief discussion when they left the road as to the exact location of the West Base and the best approach. Aimi favored along the ridges, which would allow them to see further, while Kane counseled on the inside edge of the draws, to avoid being observed. They compromised on the upper slopes, just above the trees, which had its own advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately the older kunoichi thought the exchange and insight into her new companion's thoughts far more enlightening than the importance of the choice.

As she let Aimi lead, because it suited their respective temperaments better and also to test the teenager's skills, Kane was happy about one thing at least. The voices were dim, and Aimi did not draw them. They were not silent, she had been blooded, had explained about the brief rebellion staged the last time Orochimaru had apparently vanished, but she was not soaked in it. The voices were starting to reveal that about people, as Kane heard them louder and louder each day.

She realized now that Himei Onna's curse was taking some time to settle upon her. The whispers had been barely there in Iwa, or it might have been difficult to look upon the Tsuchikage, for there was assuredly a mountain of hatred buried there. It was worrisome, what might happen now in battle, when she was in a position to give those wraithly urges the violent release they demanded. Kane simply had no idea what would happen, and it frightened her.

"We're close," Aimi spoke quietly, letting the words die a short distance from her mouth, so they could not be overheard from afar. "We pass over the crest here and it should be directly on the other side. No sign of sentries so far," she paused. "But I doubt they'd be out this far, guards tend to be lazy."

"Relying on tendencies gets you killed," Kane intoned grimly. "It almost did me, once. We'll go around and approach from the north, on the oblique."

"Got it," Aimi surged into motion immediately on receiving the word.

It was perhaps a strain of impetuousness, but the quickness to act could also be an asset. The Iwa kunoichi followed swiftly.

Taking the long way around meant the sun had set by the time they could see the entrance, a broad hole cut loosely into the side of the butte. The dusk was actually a benefit from Kane's perspective, it made them much harder to see as they observed, but accentuated movement, making it easier to spot guards on patrol.

Staring for a long while next to Aimi she saw no one by the entrance at all. It was surprising, and she tapped the teenager for confirmation, but received only a shake of the head. There was no one outside.

"Alright," Kane spoke as quietly as possible. "Go up and look inside. If it's clear motion me up. If anything, and I mean anything, goes wrong, fall back to me, I'll cover you."

"Got it," Aimi surged into motion.

Ostensibly Kane might have taken the scout role herself, being certainly much better at sneaking about, but she wanted to be able to help the younger member if she got into trouble, and there were those bangles to reckon with. Odd though the strange weapons could be, they enabled the wielder to get a jump on an enemy in many situations. Often reaction swiftness was essential in close encounters.

The teenager advanced swiftly, knowing that being unobserved over the open ground was almost impossible against the kind of trained watcher who could have avoided their notice. She focused only on stepping lightly, being as quiet as possible. It was a difficult task for a sound ninja, who in contrast to convention relied on noise in battle. That, Kane knew, was one of the many contributing reasons why sound use had been neglected for so long.

No incidents occurred on Aimi's quick rush to the entrance. She bent around the edge, low to the ground at first and then moving up to her full height. She looked around in a full circle thereafter and then silently motioned Kane forward.

The special jounin mirrored her companion's approach, reaching the entrance on the same side. Looking in there was mostly darkness; the overhead lights were not on, only a flickering bit of yellow from deep inside. This was puzzling, prisons, and Orochimaru's had no been an exception, usually ran the lighting together, to synchronize the duties and the prisoners. Putting an ear to the opening Kane listened carefully, trying to pick up something she might not be able to discern with eyesight.

"No signs of violence," Aimi spoke at her ear. "And no smell of blood, or fresh urine."

"Point," Kane noted. "But there is a faint echo, must be a thick door between us."

"The plan?"

It was a decent question, and no time to be standing around out here. They appeared to have the initiative, so it should be utilized. "String a wire across the entrance, waist height and head height. We can roll out if we have to and maybe buy a precious second. After that, we go in, side by side."

"Got it," Aimi affirmed a hint of satisfaction in her voice.

It was the work of mere seconds to string the wire, and then they were creeping down the hallway, slowly, letting their night vision adjust and being cautious for traps. Both ninja had a shuriken on wire in the left hand, swinging it back and forth so it would clear the air in front of them before they passed. Kane carried a kunai in the right, Aimi, with her bangles, didn't bother.

There were in point of fact two doors between the entrance and the lighted room, which by position Kane determined must be the guard's kitchen. It was very clear that whoever remained in the prison, most were gone. Aimi found the first of the four cell chambers with the bars cut, sawed through, not smashed by strength or jutsu. A silent touch-only examination of the lock indicated that it had not been opened. Exactly what this meant was unclear.

"Someone may hear if we open the door," Aimi muttered when they reached that point of decision.

It was one of those tricky moments that tended to come in intrusion missions. Ultimately you had to take a risk if you wanted to accomplish anything. Kane decided to try one last bit of reconnaissance first. She put her ear to the door, trying to hear the sound coming from the other side. It was very faint, but she could almost hear something, and though distorted it had a distinctive signature. "A song," she told Aimi. "Or an instrument at any rate." She tried not to analyze the implications of that further, now was not the time.

"So?" Aimi sounded a little bit impatient.

"Be ready to throw," the spooled up their shuriken on wires. The special jounin pulled out a smoke bomb. "If it looks bad, you throw, I drop, and we both run, got it?"

"Right," the teenage kunoichi nodded. "I get the door?"

Kane gave her the thumbs up.

The door was stout, wood reinforced with metal, and the fittings had never been good and had warped through time. It squealed as it opened, loudly.

There was suddenly no music, but instead the sound of another door opening, a rapid development worrisome to the waiting pair of ninja.

Light flooded them, momentarily disorienting, but Kane gritted her teeth and made certain she got a glimpse before blinking. Thankfully the light was not strong.

A young woman, a teenager close to Aimi's age really, stood in the kitchen, but not just behind the door, at least two meters back, having pulled it open with a string.

Her appearance pulled the eye in with vortex relentlessness.

Damn, Kane considered this girl. She was not at all an unattractive woman, and she knew how to make herself appear so as to make others drool, it was an essential part of her work sometimes, but this girl came close to making her jealous. She was not beautiful, her looks were far too accessible for that, but she was luscious. Her body struck the perfect balance, the precisely slender figure, ideal bust, luminescent pale skin, and heart-shaped face above it all. Indigo blue hair swept back into a loose flaring ponytail also drew the eye and matched her outfit, an exotic tight-fitting short dress in a foreign style, it wrapped about her front but left the sides and back open while covering the shoulders, extending out at the waist not to cover but to flash panels and extensions behind the back down to the knee. A pair of shorts-like garments wrapped about the waist and socks that did not quite meet them rode up from just below the ankles, where they just failed to meet the shoes below.

All of this was in principle colored the same dark indigo of her hair, highlighted by a deep purple backdrop and aquamarine highlights in several places, including two columns of flowers marching up her chest. It was unbelievably alluring, and equally distracting, which, when it took Kane well over a full second to notice the exquisite long flute the girl was holding, she realized had to be the point.

By virtue of stealing their breath away this flute bearing vision spoke first. "Not quite who I was hoping for," she seemed disappointed. "Aimi?" now surprise spread to them all. "And Kiriko?"

Aimi found her voice first, and she stepped forward without suspicion, putting the kunai away. "It's good to see you," she reached out as she crossed the distance, starting to offer a hug, and then, to Kane's eye, appeared to reconsider, and simply gave a faint little bow.

Now the girl smiled, and the special jounin snapped back from her momentary envious loss. "Kiyomasa Wakana," she stood forward herself, but did not approach nearly so close as her companion had, or bow. "It is good to see you alive, and become quite the vision it seems."

"Perhaps," the young woman, Wakana, raised an eyebrow. "I'm not sure if I can say the same of you Kiriko, since you're supposed to be dead and you're wearing Iwa colors." She turned suddenly and stared at Aimi. "So are you." It came out as an accusation.

"She was a spy," Aimi jerked a thumb at Kane. "Now she's come with an offer for us sound users to join Iwa village."

It was not, precisely, how Kane would have handled revealing the information, but Wakana didn't appear particularly shocked. "Really? So that would mean you're not actually Kiriko then?"

"Tsuchi Kane is the name that is recorded in Iwa," the older kunoichi answered.

"This seems like a complicated situation," Wakana muttered, not directing her words at anyone. "I was more or less done practicing anyway, would you discuss it over dinner? The food is decidedly less than ideal, but we have free run of the whole pantry."

Aimi laughed, and with that, it seemed pointless to refuse.


	9. 09 In the Key of Revolution

**In the Key of Revolution**

"So," Wakana concluded after the over dinner explanations had finished. "Basically, you want me to join Iwa, so that hypothetically we could beat up on that annoying Sasuke and any friends he might have sometime in the future."

"Essentially," Kane replied. She was not certain what Wakana was driving at. The young woman, who had remained here after the guards had peaceably ended the base's operations by leaving a hacksaw in reach of the cells while they left, wanted something. It was far more distinctive than the desire to simply be a ninja she had sensed in Aimi, but it remained mysterious at the moment.

"Fine," the flute-bearing kunoichi responded. "Now then, what's in it for me?"

"I thought we'd been over this," Kane replied carefully, trying to process the sudden demand. "You're unlikely to survive as a ninja without being part of a village, and even if you do you'll be forever on the run."

"I know that," the teenager snapped back irritably. "I also don't care. Being a ninja doesn't mean much to me, but I guess you forgot that part."

The special jounin had, but now she remembered, and it was a very sad memory indeed. The seal on Wakana's forehead was gone, the young kunoichi had explained that it faded with Orochimaru's death, a confirmation that had helped provide the peaceful resolution at this facility, but looking back Kane could recall it being inscribed. The design had been pioneered by the Hyuga family of Konoha, as part of some complicated inter-family feud, but it had long-since spread widely, being far too useful to men like Orochimaru, or even, she admitted deep in her heart, her own Tsuchikage. The power to compel obedience, a vise over the mind making a person into a pawn; it was a vile power, but one possessing considerable use in the dark depths of the ninja world.

"I understand that," she replied carefully. "Nevertheless, I'm sure you realize there's no going back. You are a ninja now."

"I know that damn it!" Wakana suddenly shouted. "I know! I hate it!"

"Hey," Aimi interjected, trying to calm the suddenly outraged girl down. "Being a ninja is not so bad."

"You don't understand Aimi," Wakana's voice became calmer, but also cold, brutally angry. "When Orochimaru found you, you had nothing. Nothing! I remember your story you know, ran away from home, working with traveling entertainers, most of them killed by bandits. He took you from a pale shadow of a life." Her eyes narrowed, and the older kunoichi began to understand the anger, and just what this young one desired. "I had a life, a real life, and promise! I was on the rise, I could have been great. I even had a family, bumbling perhaps, but my parents loved me, cared about me. Orochimaru took that from me, all of it. I can't get it back anymore, but someone, someone is going to pay for what I lost!"

She does have cause, Kane reminded herself silently, remembering. It was even in part her fault, regrettably. After all, she had been the own who explained that Tayuya's growth was being held back by her limited ability as a flute player. The technique had great potential, music was more powerful than simple noise or percussive sound, but who could be a ninja and a musician? If there was any mistake Kane had repeatedly made while posing as the white snake's servant, it was underestimating his mad genius. Who would have imagined that he would abduct the best young flute player in the ninja countries, a true musical prodigy, and seek to bend her to his will? It was so brazen, but he had done it.

"You desire revenge," she told Wakana. "Understandable, we all have grievances here, but Orochimaru is dead."

"I know that," her bitterness was obvious. "But Sasuke lives and others. Anyone who still stands behind Orohcimaru, those are the ones who need to pay."

It was not an unexpected response, and understanding that, Kane now knew what to say. "You will have a better chance of getting that revenge alongside Iwa then."

"What?" Wakana was suddenly confused, giving the special jounin a chance to forge ahead.

"I don't know what Sasuke wants," she began. "Probably revenge himself, his brother killed his family as I understand it. His associations are mostly with the Leaf, so your best chance would be there, but those idealists would never accept Orochimaru's leavings. Besides, I seriously doubt their competence to achieve much of anything at this point considering they never managed to defeat the rogue Sannin. However, as part of Iwa you have a greater chance of getting the satisfaction you desire. If you are a member of the village everything the village does is partly your own. Additionally, you'll never defeat Sasuke alone, but Iwa's might could."

"Maybe," but Kane knew she had persuaded the teenager by the little smile on that lovely face. "I see your point, but I'm not completely convinced. You doubt Konoha, you say, well, I doubt Iwa. If you want my help, you'll have to prove it."

"And how would I do that?" Kane believed she saw where this was going, but she wanted the other to make the statement.

"You said you're a special jounin, and have been for years," Wakana's voice was low. "You were our sensei too. That being the case, surely you can beat me in a fight, right?"

"That seems reasonable," Kane nodded, smiling a little. "I confess I desire to see how your abilities have developed over these past three years in any case."

"I'll referee," Aimi tossed in jovially, clearly amused. "It's dark, but there's some moonlight, and I can set out a few lamps, if that's okay."

"No reason to wait for morning," Kane indicated and Wakana nodded.

Outside it was difficult to see, but not impossible. There was a fair amount of moonlight and starlight, and Aimi quickly put a few lanterns out. The result was dim and shadowy, but nothing ninja nightvision couldn't handle.

Kane was not overconfident against Wakana. Yes she was five years older than her opponent, with far more real battle experience, but that didn't mean she should take the teenage ninja lightly. As an espionage agent her skills were not ideal for field combat. Neither knew each other's full jutsu repertoire, but both had some idea.

They stood apart, with Aimi off to the side, waiting for the moment. Wakana stood casually, her pose confidently poised, with a fierce expression. She is eager to show off her jutsu, the special jounin knew. Her skills have no doubt increased markedly in the years in prison. Yet she did not look at her opponent, instead focusing on the terrain, considering her options. Close in, I am probably still better, but she is not helpless, I taught her to use the sword, and the flute Orochimaru made is deadly in that way as well. Kane expected her best plan was to stay low and close. Her fighting style, schooled in the art of bedside murders and narrow corridors, was at its best at extreme close range. She would have to stay low, evade, and seek an opening to get in.

"Begin!" Aimi announced suddenly, chaotically, as was appropriate.

Kane began the battle by rolling right, hurling a pair of shuriken at Wakana's position as she dashed to her right, circling toward the ridge where the facility was buried.

The flute-player sidestepped easily, moving only her legs, her upper body in complete control, and began her Song.

Kane did not look at her opponent, deliberately keeping her eyes on the ground before her, avoiding all temptation to focus on Wakana. It was against all conventional ninja combat practice, which schooled you to never lose sight of the opponent for even an instant, lest you be tricked by Replacement or Clone and stabbed in the back, but she knew eyes were useless here. The attacks wielded by Wakana could not be seen, and attempting to follow her fingers, to track them, as many ninja might, was useless. It might work against a ninja reliant on formulae like Tayuya, but this girl was an artist, her Song flowed with its power, trilling through a million iterations each different yet according to the same overriding theme.

The Special Jounin kept her own motion chaotic, moving upslope with little hops, ducking, rolling, weaving and zigzagging. To stand in place was madness, she had to make her actions erratic, impossible to pinpoint, arrhythmic, or she was dead.

A pair of shuriken hurtled from the ninja's hand toward the flute player, quick snapshots not designed truly to harm, but to disrupt as Kane adjusted her angle to begin a spiral inward back toward the target.

Years ago, when Wakana was a student, the move would have forced the deadly song to pause, but not now. Without missing a beat the stylish ninja jumped in a looping spin, passing over the metal darts by a few inches, then coming down with a powerful, exultant note.

Then the blows began to land.

Muchiutsu no Uta, the Song of Lashing, so named for the whip-snap sound of the blades of sound and chakra it created. Kane knew it well, she had named it herself. It was Wakana's simplest jutsu, yet it was a more potent technique than most jounin would ever wield. Such was her song.

Don't listen to the song, listen to the blades! Kane knew this, but it was still difficult to remember, the deception of the music and the clothes all hid the brutal power. Got to dodge, avoid, if I stay in one place I'll be smashed.

She dropped to the ground suddenly, and rolled right, choosing the move at random, the only true assurance it would not be anticipated.

With whipcrack sound and swordblow force an indentation appeared in the dirt to the special jounin's left, a blade of sound-powered wind having slammed into the space she had occupied only moments before. Kane didn't stop, but flipped forward, then took three steps directly backward instead of keeping moving in a single direction.

Her efforts were rewarded, the howling air passed before her body, not through it. Hearing the noise of the technique was hardly useful, Kane knew, the Doppler Effect compressed the air such that the sound arrived only an instant before the force, far too late for any but the absolute fastest ninja to dodge, and often not even then.

How many can she control at once? How long can she keep it up? Those were the questions most troubling as Kane ran, trying to close in while still avoiding a brutal counterstike. She knew the technique, understood the principles, but not the power Wakana had acquired. When she had left, three years before, there had been only one blade in the air at any moment, and they could curve only a little. It was obviously stronger now, two, no, almost certainly three blades at once were coming. Kane felt them streak by her suddenly on both sides, and yet some instinct guided her to hop upward, saving her from having her feet sliced off. There was no gauge, Sound jutsu was experimental, even the theoretical limits were unknown.

Two options, Kane realized, momentarily abandoning her approach as a blast of sound passed close enough to one ear to leave her briefly deafened. Keep running and try to last her out, or find some way to rig an attack. She decided on the second almost immediately, breaking wide and running for a bit of distance, and then throwing herself to the ground as an attack curved down from above, pulling into what was later apparent as a brutally tight arc. Well, one question answered, she can control them very effectively now. The special jounin felt a little surge of pride, a distraction she did not need right then, for a mistake could surely get her killed, Wakana was not holding back any.

I am in open ground, there's no cover and no intersecting angles, not even any trees, and it all plays to her strengths. I need something vertical, something to provide a rapid shift in momentum; in flat ground I can't gather the necessary speed. Rapid assessment of terrain was something any intelligence agent had drilled in deep down, and Kane knew she had few opportunities. Fighting in an open valley was a poor plan for any ninja. That was how samurai fought, which, as the Tsuchikage had once explained, was a kind way to say 'stupid.'

Wakana did not let Kane go for distance freely. She never paused in her playing, letting the blades of wind continue, but steadily walked forward. With the special jounin's speed limited by the constant need to be erratic and unpredictable no headway could be gained. The dirt and rocks groaned as blades slashed at them, leaving dark marks in the lamplight, evidence of the mighty forces in play.

For a moment, Kane dared to look back, feeling the hot wind of those brutal lashes upon her, and she saw Wakana's steady advance. There was no internal debate; she would not waste kunai or shuriken right now. Her opponent was no doubt willing to move into taking a non-lethal blow while unleashing a deadly riposte. Kane could see no options, her own jutsu were not directly offensive, and in any case the time it would take to unleash one could get her head taken off.

If this continues, she'll win, inevitably I'll make some mistake and that will be it, there is no margin for error. Am I so weak? She felt her heart sink. Have my students surpassed me so easily?

Yet in looking back Kane saw something and she realized she was going the wrong way.

Orochimaru's west base had a solid entrance carved into the hillside; the door was supported by load-bearing beams.

She moved, letting chakra flow through her body freely, moving faster and sharper than normal, wasting energy in the long run for a temporary gain. It left her vulnerable, channeling chakra through all the body at full strength made forming jutsu difficult, so it was usually only used by taijutsu specialists, but for now, speed overrode all other needs.

Blades of wind followed Kane, never letting up, but she managed to remain just a step ahead. Dust and grit covered her close from near misses and many desperate rolls, and she was accumulating a substantial collection of bruises, gradually weakening. This damage played into Wakana's hands, enough of it and her muscles would be too drained to fight close in whenever the teenager ran out of chakra to continue her sonic assault.

Kane had no intention of letting things get to that point.

A blade of sound-compelled wind slammed into the left hand beam, shearing it half through, launching a baleful crack deep into the darkened hills, terrifying in its volume.

Kane ignored the move, running full tilt over the last few meters, accelerating to full speed, and then launching her body at the right hand beam.

She compressed down taking the immense force on her knees, channeling chakra to her feet, and pushing off with everything she had, as muscle and sinew and bone screamed in strain. Even as she did, Kane carefully brushed the stout wooden pylon, held in place by the entire force of the hillside above it, with her right hand, setting the critical peace into motion.

Launching into midair was usually the absolutely most idiotic thing a ninja could do in the middle of battle, since you can't push off air, leaving you completely at the mercy of the laws of motion until landing, but carefully planned it could be made effective. The special jounin saw her opponent's eyes widen in puzzlement at the strange maneuver, but to Wakana's credit she did not hesitate, her song directing the lashes of wind in to rip Kane apart as she moved.

Then the line pulled taught.

It hurt, oh it hurt, the wire cutting deep into delicate skin on the forearm and wrist as forty-eight and one half kilograms of kunoichi came up against about ten thousands metric tons of dirt and rock. Wire snapped to the end, and the bolt driven deep into the wood in that critical moment held fast. Kane's flesh held as well, despite the cutting pain, and the forces cancelled, leaving gravity to take over, pulling her back down.

The special jounin hit the ground with a forward roll, slashing through her wire with a kunai in her left hand. For a moment, and only a moment, all Wakana's blades were out of position. Kane sprinted forward with all her speed.

Teenage or not, prison had hardened reactions into taught strings, and the flute player was not caught offguard for long. There was an instant of silence, and then she changed tactics, for Kiyomasa Wakana did not control only one song.

A single note, clear and with every decibel of power the kunoichi's body could compel, burst from the flute, unleashing a spherical blast of power to hurl back anyone who approached.

Kane had expected this, and did not brace, but threw herself into the assault, leaving the ground just a tiny bit so the wall of sound did not throw her down, but instead flipped her upright through the air. It hurt, charging animals might strike with less force, but it was spread out over her whole body, survivable, unable to cause a serious wound without slamming her into something else. Trained to maintain disguise at all costs, the special jounin could endure great pain for someone her size, and even as the blast passed she was forming the handseals for the technique she would need next.

"Douton: Kiteichouha!" Her feet stomped down as she landed, and with the projection of her chakra the ground rippled, buckling and twisting, streaking out like it was a pond and Kane a dropped stone.

Knowledge of her opponent was not one-sided in this battle, for Wakana knew this technique, and did not react foolishly, jumping high in the air to avoid the ground wave, but instead skipped forward, hopping over the crest of the moving soil by only a few inches, smoothly restoring her fighting position.

It made no difference, Kane was already charging, kunai out in her left hand. There would be no time to play any more songs on the deadly flute.

Many ninja, seeing Wakana in her figure-flaunting garb for the first time and seeing her play her flute in battle, would assume the teenager had no ability in close in combat at all. Maybe another ninja would have trained the girl that way, but not Orochimaru, he believed in mastery of everything, and had paid for a flute just as dangerous as any sword.

With a practiced motion the blue-dressed teenager snapped her left hand down, spinning her flute around so the mouthpiece shot outward, coming up into the grip of her waiting right hand. The alloyed cylinder came down to meet Kane's charge in a simple but perfectly executed chop cut.

Close in Kane was surely the better fighter than her opponent, but Wakana's weapon was longer, and her own body undamaged, it had to be ended quickly. The special jounin's left arm darted in, putting all her motion behind the blow, only to suddenly drop the kunai and reveal a second one held in her opposite hand.

Caught by surprise, Wakana nevertheless reacted quickly, and Kane's body was off-balance. The flute dashed across, a weak maneuver and poorly positioned for any follow-up, but enough to block the kunai and buy time for a step back, sufficent to restore the advantage to the longer weapon.

The two blades clanged together, driving the kunai away, leaving Wakana untouched.

Kane smiled into the teenager's surprised face. "Got you," she whispered, and put the point of her needle, held in her left hand, to the younger kunoichi's jugular vein. "I win."

"When-" Wakana blurted, not believing, reaching up to feel the sharp metal point, part of a long needle-blade normal worn as a hairpin. "You dropped one kunai and then drew a hidden weapon in the same hand?" It was a combination of amazement and incredulity.

"Everything is deception," Kane answered, it was her favorite ninja saying, and the first one her teachers had made her memorize as part of disguise training. "My best tool is disguise, and even in combat, that does not change. I managed to make you forget I was a spy, and so you were defeated. Your jutsu is far more powerful than mine when it comes to killing people, but power does not win battles most nights."

"So it seems," Wakana gave a wry smile, the adrenalin filling her moments ago now dissipating. "Well, consider the lesson learned, and I have to admit it seems partnering with Iwa village has much to recommend it."

"You're surprised?" Aimi's voice, suddenly shattering the isolation of the duel, interjected. "They're called the great ninja villages for a reason." She had a broad smile on her face. "Still, your song's something to hear Wakana, its way better than it used to be. I wouldn't want to fight you, even if I could win; I think I'd be missing a few pieces."

"Do you share her opinion, Kane?" Wakana said the name somewhat uncomfortably, but her question was totally serious.

"Yes," the special jounin replied without hesitation. "Your mastery of sound jutsu is greater than anything I've ever seen or heard, and extremely dangerous. I understood how it worked, allowing me to dodge and evade, most enemies will have no clue, and would be totally outmatched. I would not be surprised if you took many jounin apart in a few seconds with those blades as they are now." Kane looked at Aimi, considered for a moment, and then added. "Even knowing its abilities, if you combined with a melee fighter to occupy the foe I don't see any good way to stand against that power."

"I'm glad," Wakana smiled softly, her expression sad but oddly buoyant. "Maybe I can eventually become a great ninja then. Not nearly as good as what I wanted, but it makes for a halfway decent consolation prize."

Kane smiled herself, surprised at her own happiness at the young woman's recognition of a new path, how little desired it may have been. She felt a little bit of her guilt at causing all this melt away. "Well then, if you will swear loyalty, you can have this," she took out the Iwa forehead protector and offered it to Wakana.

"I accept this," the teenager's voice became deadly serious. "I will serve Iwa and the Tsuchikage with all my strength," they she flashed a quirking smile and laughed. "At least I will after I figure out how to attach this to my own headband," she pointed at the wide indigo band holding back her hair. "I can't wear this as it is, it will clash horribly."

Kane and Aimi joined in the laughter after that.

Later, as they laid out bedding material in the guard's kitchen, having no desire to sleep in Orochimaru's outpost but no better options, Wakana asked Kane about the next move.

The older kunoichi sighed. "When he gave me this mission the Tsuchikage told me my chance for any success at all was very small, and I agreed with him, much though I hoped otherwise. To find the two of you is far more than I might have expected. Nevertheless, I cannot simply go back to Iwa now," she grimaced. "Knowing you two live means others might yet live, and I cannot abandon any possibility without making a thorough search."

"So we're going to the north base then," Aimi grimaced. "I really would rather not you know."

"Being a ninja is not about doing what we wish," Kane shook her head solemnly, she didn't much like the idea of seeing Orochimaru's experiments up close either, but it had to be done. Still, she would not put her burden on others unnecessarily. "However, you two need not go with me. This is my mission, not yours. I can write you a letter of introduction and have you proceed on to Iwa directly."

"Not going to happen," Aimi snapped back immediately, surprising the older kunoichi. "You may not be our sensei anymore, but I'm not running from a fight just because I'm squeamish, you taught us better than that. Besides, if anyone is alive, they're our friends too."

"And who would believe us if we walked into Iwa alone?" Wakana raised an eyebrow. "We will need you to be our advocate. In any case, I doubt there's anyone left alive at the north base by now. Sasuke must have gone there, and the cursed seal prisoners would surely have rioted when they learned Orochimaru perished. We can handle it."

The support was extremely heartening, though Kane did not let the others see it, she could keep any emotion from her body language if she wished it. "Very well, we can set out in the morning then, assuming there are no better targets to search. Do you know of any?" she asked the pair.

Aimi shook her head. Wakana looked behind her briefly before answering. "I studied the records here, they mention all sorts of little bases and hidey-holes, and labs Kabuto were apparently using, but no coordinates. I think glasses-boy must have kept them all in his head. There used to be a base in the east, but apparently someone found out about it eighteen months back and it was abandoned. He consolidated everything to the north base after that."

Kane nodded, about what she had expected. Had she not found Aimi and Wakana searching for those many labs would have been a long, hard effort, but now she knew only the north base was a worthy enterprise. Anyone Orochimaru had hidden deeper than that would never be found and staying abroad any longer was too great a risk. Wakana's knowledge proved Orochimaru really was dead, not just rumor. Big things would happen as a result, and the special jounin wanted to stay out of the way for the present. That brat Sasuke has some kind of agenda, probably something about his brother. Being an orphan wasn't easy, but thinking about the Uchiha family sometimes Kane thought she had the better of it.

"Well then, let's get some rest, there's a lot of walking to do, and I for one am going to hurt like hell in the morning," Kane noted, and she couldn't help but notice Wakana's nasty little smile before turning out the light. It seems the student got to pay back the teacher for all those lumps during training. It hurt, but it was a proud kind of pain.

**Chapter Notes:** Douton: Kiteichouha means Earth Element: Ground Wave Technique, Wakana's Muchiutsu no Uta means Song of Lashing.


End file.
